The desert scout was dead, cut down by a lancer, but not before he put more arrows through the eyes and throats of five Kingsmen and Brother Absen. Their deaths were instantaneous; Avani arrived too late to save them.
Morgan dispatched a messenger to the king’s constable who was said to be riding somewhere near Wilhaiim’s westmost line. The dead Kingsmen and Absen and Shin were loaded with grim ceremony into a cart for burial in the city. At Morgan’s command their killer was quartered and his head mounted atop the baldachin. Afterward his ghost paced back and forth between the baldachin and the forest, blue eyes tilted always toward the top of the baldachin and his severed head. The theists and three of the soldiers returned to their god without Avani’s assistance. Two lingered, either confused by the suddenness of their deaths or frightened by what might lie beyond. Avani used a banishing cant to send them on.
She let the desert haunt be in the hopes that he might decide to speak anything of interest, but he seemed to care only for his head and the indignity of that display. Avani didn’t blame him for it.
“Can’t you interrogate it?” Morgan appealed when she mentioned the spirit’s restless misery. “Make it tell us if more are coming, and from where?”
“Mal could,” she said. “I won’t. And I promise you more are coming. Ramp up your guard patrols, my lord, night and day. I expect we won’t have much longer to wait.”
“Can you use his bones,” Liam suggested, “to set further wards around the garrison?” He rested one hand protectively on Bear’s wedge head. The brindled hound, first to sound alarm when the scout breeched the garrison, now refused to leave her master’s side for any length of time.
“Only if he’s willing, and I very much doubt he would be.” Grim, Avani shook her head. “Ai, mayhap the poor dead soldiers, or even Absen, but I did not think and now it’s too late.”
“You did not think. I did not think.” Morgan knuckled his eyes. He had not rested or eaten since the morning attack. Avani caught him looking often down the cliff in the direction of Whitcomb, as if by staring he could will his mother more quickly to his side. But the day was coming to close and there was as yet no sign of Wythe. “What good are you and I, then, if we don’t stop to think?”
“Sit and sup, my lord,” Liam coaxed, ladling boiled oats from their cookpot into a bowl. In all the commotion, they’d forgotten supplies at the quartermaster’s tent and now they hadn’t the heart, any of them, to wander back down the hill and in sight of the baldachin where Brother Cenwin grieved, prostrate, in front of his altar. “I’ve added honey.”
“Honey.” Morgan walked from the cliff’s edge and snatched up the bowl, scowling. “This is the banshee’s fault, I think, lurking about. Bringing ill luck to my garrison. I imagine she’s laughing right now, believing us fools.” He made a motion as if to toss the bowl and oats both over the edge of the cliff but Avani stayed his hand.
“If you won’t eat it,” she said. “I will. I’m tired and hungry and sorrowing. I knew Absen only a short time, but he was a good man. I think he would not like to see you blaming yourself. And I do not believe Cleena brought us ill luck, any more than Jacob has. It’s only superstition, to explain away the misgivings that keep us awake at night.”
Jacob, nested comfortably again inside Morgan’s tent, grumbled loud agreement.
Thusly admonished, Morgan sat on the ground to eat. “I know it,” he said after a silence. “We should have expected this—the flatland has been rife with wandering sand snakes since early summer. Only, my mother set the guards and I assumed they were sufficient.”
“They were sufficient.” Liam filled another bowl and placed it in Avani’s hands. The steaming oats warmed her fingers through the pottery. “Against a man on horseback. Mayhap not one sneaking about on foot through the undergrowth, bow in hand and with better aim even than I.”
“I’ve doubled the watch,” Morgan said around a mouthful of honey and oats. “We’ll have word from Wilhaiim before dark, I imagine. And mother soon after.” He scraped his spoon on the bottom of his bowl. “This is good.”
It was good. Avani’s stomach, forgotten for most of the day, woke to sharp hunger. She ate slowly, savoring each bite. Cleena’s honey turned otherwise bland oats sweet. When she was finished, she let Bear lick around the bowl, then rose and wandered to the cliff edge, hoping to catch the beginnings of sunset over Whitcomb.
“Riders on the highway,” she reported before Morgan could ask. “Bearing Renault’s device. Word from the king on the matter, I expect.” She squinted. “Nothing from the coast, that I can tell. The road looks empty.” It had been clearing in the past hour or so, as those who had not already made refuge in the city retreated to hidden places near farm or keep. There was a new sense of urgency in the air, a hastening of preparation. Fires were lit all along the Wilhaiim’s wall-walk; she could see watchmen at work along the barbican and above the northern gate.
“Murder hole,” Morgan said, appearing at her elbow. He sounded reluctantly impressed. “A gap above the gateway from which they send spears, and arrows, and worse. Smell the boiling tar? Pots of it, waiting to be turned over any enemy who comes close. There’s a murder hole over every gate. They haven’t been uncovered since the sidhe wars, I imagine. It’s a wonder they remembered how to light the pots. They’ll have brought the tar up from Low Port weeks ago, I suppose. His Majesty knows his duty. He’ll do whatever it takes to keep us safe.”
“He will,” Avani agreed. She could not yet think on Renault without an uncomfortable mix of sympathy and resentment. She imagined the king standing in his oriel, waiting upon news of invasion while listening to Brother Tillion decry royal immorality from the street below.
“Oi, look!” Morgan pointed at the western horizon. “White smoke on the coast, there, can you see? The sea lords will be preparing their defenses, as well, kindling their watch fires.” He bounced on his toes. “It’s really happening, isn’t it?”
“Aye, my lord, it is.” Avani watched faraway smoke billow in front of the setting sun. It was a pretty picture: the blue sea, the orange sunset, and the white smoke scudding between.
“Come and rest,” Liam called from the cook fire. “While things are quiet. You’ve been standing on your feet all day.”
Morgan’s expression turned petulant. “You’re meant to be my squire, not my nursemaid.”
“Beg pardon, my lord, but I was speaking to Lady Avani,” retorted Liam, meeting Avani’s eye over the top of Morgan’s head. “Though you look as if you could do with some shut-eye yourself, and I’ll not pretend otherwise.”
“Turn around is fair play.” Avani winked at Morgan. He was a good lad, and terribly earnest, and she could see his mother’s determination in the set of his jaw. “I’ve sent that one to bed too many times to count when he was your age and more interested in playing hide-and-seek with the stars. I am weary,” she confessed, turning toward her bedroll. “So should you be. Will you rest a time, my lord?”
She thought he would consent, but then that stubborn jaw grew firm as he remembered duty. “Not quite yet,” the young earl demurred. “I should speak again to Brother Cenwin, see if there’s aught he needs in his grief. And I want to check the horses another time before dark, to make sure they’re well-guarded. The king’s message may contain new orders; I’ll meet the riders as they come, I think. And mother—” he peered again at the highway below “—will expect me to be on hand when she arrives.”
“As you will, my lord.” Her heart broke for his conviction. Liam, too, had been a resolute child, but Liam had never been taxed with the responsibilities of an earldom.
She left Morgan standing lookout and unrolled her bedding on a level spot near the earl’s tent with the cook fire to warm her back. Liam hummed under his breath as he banked the flames and scrubbed the pot and laid out Morgan’s nightshirt for later. She realized, with some surprise, that he sounded happy. Bear snuggled up along Avani’s front, laying her heavy head on Avani’s thigh. Jacob, preferring the shelter of the tent, pretended not to hear when she whistled invitation.
The sky was the color of good red weaver’s dye when she closed her eyes. Bear was snoring. And thanks to Cleena she was still blissfully alone in her own skull, warded inwardly against intrusion.
Nevertheless, she dreamed.
She dreamed she was crawling again in the barrows beneath Stonehill, Jacob hopping on the muddy ground a few paces ahead. She followed the raven down and down through the tunnel, hastening when she lost track of black feathers. The space was uncomfortably tight, as it had been when she’d first wriggled through Faolan’s hidden gate. Dangling root and glowing moss ticked the back of her head, making her shudder. Thin streams of water ran down the tunnel walls, miniature waterfalls. She lacked a mage-light but she wasn’t blind. Minuscule fragments of silver rock caught in the mud reflected a sourceless white glow, turning night to day.
The scrollwork gate at the end of the tunnel was cracked open. She could see the chamber beyond. Following Jacob, she crawled over the threshold. Once through she had enough room to stand. The ceilings were high, the old cavern at least as large as the village above. Moss and more vine dripped from the ceiling. Stone teeth grew out of the ceiling and the floor. The organic pillars were covered all around in carvings: sidhe sigils made for the purpose of protection and illumination. The chamber walls shone a diffuse white. The sidhe, who no longer walked beneath a natural sun, were forced to conjure light of their own.
“This light,” agreed Mal, walking now at her side. “Not so different than that in the old laboratories. And the sigils—” he walked dark fingers along limestone “—not so different than those in the theist spell books. Mayhap you’re more right than you know. Mayhap it all comes from the same source.”
“There are no gods but the sidhe?” Avani grimaced. “Jacob would disagree.” The raven flew in circles over their heads, neatly avoiding tangle with root and vine. His wingspan seemed to shrink and then swell as he circled, sending strangely shaped shadows onto the damp floor.
“Look,” Mal insisted. He scraped a nail against stone then held up his finger. A minuscule amber pebble glittered on the tip. “The jewel in your ring. Khorit Dard’s Heart. The magestone set in the doors of the Rani’s palace. And the yellow gem set in Faolan’s torque. Why have we never thought to wonder from whence the amber came?”
“Every stone comes first from the earth, Mal.” Impatient, Avani hurried after Jacob. “He wants me to go that way. The river tunnel.”
At the cavern’s westmost curve were four arched doorways, their mouths dark against the cavern’s glow. Once gates had secured the openings; large bronze hinges still hung in places from the limestone. More littered the ground around the old portals where, torn from the wall, they lay rusting in the mud and damp. Sidhe marks decorated the stone above each opening. Some of the sigils she knew as well as the freckles on her arms and legs—the same decoration had been carved with sidhe knives into Liam’s flesh in the very same chamber.
Jacob, now the size of a small dog, crouched in front of the left-most opening, wings half extended. He clicked his beak impatiently.
“What’s down there?” Mal asked, sniffing suspiciously at the air beyond. “Smells dank.”
“Ai, I said, the river tunnel.” She shook her head as she followed Jacob through the opening. “Why are you here? You’re not supposed to be here. I’ve locked you out.”
“I’m not here,” he said, pacing once more at her side. “You’re dreaming. That was a tidy cheat, turning your wards inside out like that. I had no idea it was possible, and if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have tried it for fear of melting my midbrain in the reversal. All that energy, cracking about near your cerebellum.”
Avani paused midstride. She shot him a narrow look. “Cerebellum. I don’t know that word. Why would my dream you know a word that I don’t?”
“We’ve spent a lot of time in each other’s heads,” Mal replied cheerfully. He looked young and carefree in the diffuse tunnel light. His hair was long again, and he smiled easily as he hadn’t since before Roue. He was dressed, not in vocent black, but in a plain linen tunic and trousers. She couldn’t be sure but she thought there was the faintest scruff of black beard on his face. “You know what I know even if you don’t, as do I you.”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“You’re the dreamer,” Mal pointed out, making Avani laugh despite her distrust. Then he gripped her wrist. “Listen. What’s that?”
“It’s only the river.”
The path soon turned steep and slick, cutting straight down into the mountain. Avani put her hand on the tunnel wall for balance. Water rained in droplets from overhead, spattering her head and shoulders. It was icy cold. Jacob, being Jacob, managed to stay dream-dry even as he splashed through mud and shallow puddles.
The tunnel twisted sharply to the right once, and then again, and yet once more. Soon they were walking in tight circles, descending at a precipitous rate. The sound of the river grew loud, like many voices whispering at once, or an angry storm rifling countless leafy tree tops. The tunnel wall trembled beneath her hand. The tunnel floor became a muddy stream, catching at her ankles.
“I don’t think that’s the river you’re hearing,” said Mal as the ground abruptly evened out, flat and straight, now more tributary than tunnel.
Avani had been that way once before, and not in a dreaming. She’d explored the tunnel all on her own, out of curiosity, and not because a black-feathered bird insisted on drawing her through vision space. She remembered the twisty decent, the fear when she thought she’d missed the correct turning in her haste, the water rising from ankle to waist. She remembered the second cavern down below the river, flooded but for an island of limestone at the very center.
The island was there, and the ice-cold flood. But it wasn’t the Mors River rushing above and around that she heard after all: on the island gathered a population of barrowmen, so many they were forced to stand shoulder-to-shoulder or crouch knee to knee. Corpse-white, flat-eyed, too thin, they were naked or dressed in fur or pieces of mismatched fabric. Many held sticks, or bronze knives, or pieces of sharpened bone. Some had covered their heads with tattered scarves or wide-brimmed villein’s caps. One wore a noblewoman’s stained silken gown over stockings made of old lace.
They were whispering amongst themselves. Their voices, sibilant and strange, shook the walls. When at last they noticed Avani, they fell immediately silent.
Jacob, circling again overhead, threw a shadow large enough to blacken the island entire. They barrowmen stood unmoving beneath that penumbra, faces upturned and afraid.
“Cast him out,” ordered Avani’s Goddess through Jacob, as the raven’s shadow spread over water and limestone, blotting diffuse sidhe light to black. Avani, guilty, looked around at Mal where he stood thigh-deep in water, brows lifted in mute confusion, but it was not Mal the Goddess meant.
“Make a chalice of his head bones,” the barrowmen agreed, voices mingled to one roar. “Bring the torches!” They straightened, gripping knives and bone in long-fingered hands, regaining courage. “He’s coming! Cast him out!” They cavorted in place, a battle dance, and all around them the cavern shook until chunks of rock and mud thundered into the lake from the ceiling above.
“He’s coming,” warned the Goddess.
And “Cast him out!” screamed Jacob from his perch on Avani’s chest where she slept atop the cliffs. Bear reared upright, alarmed, growling. Avani sat up, dislodging Jacob, almost breaking her forehead on Liam’s as he bent to shake her.
“Wake up,” Liam said. “I smell smoke on the wind, and not the good, clean sort. It’s started.”
Clouds obscured the moon. Wind rattled the baldachin’s roof and chased sparks from torches. Wythe was preparing for battle. Kingsmen strapped on armor with the help of squires. The coursers, too, wore plate over quilted blankets to guard their sides and haunches, and stiff leather masks called shaffrons to guard their faces. The shaffrons were adorned on the cheek pieces with Wythe’s willow-tree device, and made the animals look quite fierce. They stamped their hooves and switched their tails as mail was tucked and tied and belted into place, snorting at the stench of char on the wind.
Avani made herself useful near the baldachin, steadying Brother Cenwin when he had need of it, keeping busy in between. Groundwork at night was a hazardous thing without nerves running high. Soldiers and servants were stepped upon by excited horses, or sliced on a mail edge, or recovering from too much drink the evening before. Avani handed out ginger to the gut-sick and willow bark for the aching heads. She bandaged sliced flesh and splinted broken bones. She had a stern word with Brother Cenwin when he faltered in the face of Absen’s lack, and another with the desert scout’s ghost when it walked straight through a gelding mid-tackup, making the horse kick and squeal.
The king’s constable had not yet returned from the western curve of the line. Messages coming fast by wing or by rider from Wilhaiim suggested that attack had come first from that direction. Red and orange flame leapt high into the night sky where last sunset they’d been able to see Whitcomb’s white clapboard. The wind blew a vague, anguished din eastward with the smoke; sometimes Avani knew the screams were human distress, but other times she assured herself it was only the shrieks of coastal gulls disturbed in the night by smoke and fire.
By tradition Morgan was the last man to sit his horse. Avani held Wilde’s head as the lad reached for his stirrup, making soothing noises though the bay gelding stood quietly. The noises were for Morgan and for Liam. The young earl shivered in his mail and tried twice before he made the saddle from the mounting block. In the light of the torches Liam’s smile, meant to be reassuring, was ghastly under his helm as he handed up Morgan’s lance.
“I think you’re meant to give a speech, say something bracing,” he counseled. “I’ll be two ticks behind you, my lord.”
Morgan gathered the reins. Wilde bobbed his head, quiet as a lamb.
“I know what to do,” he said. “Liam, don’t dawdle. My lady, keep safe.”
Then he snapped his visor to, wheeled the gelding around, and cantered away to address his waiting men.
As soon as Morgan was gone, Liam put his hands on his knees and breathed at the ground. Avani, recognizing an onset of panic when she saw one, resisted the urge to pat his shoulders and instead waited quietly. He didn’t faint, but she thought it was a close thing.
“The infantry’s come up the hill and settled behind our line to wait,” he said thickly after a moment. “That’s a burned city on the wind—you and I both know it. Everyone knows it.” He straightened. He wore a battered cuirass, scrubbed to gleaming, over pieces of leather scavenged from the barracks, and a kettle helm with a leather strap to keep it snug. “It’s happening now.”
She did touch him then, a light brush of fingers to his set face.
“Morgan’s not ready,” he said. “I didn’t have time to make him ready. He’s always hated the quintain because he falls off every time and he’ll never say it out loud but I think he’s afraid of blood.”
“I didn’t have time to make you ready, either, but you’ve done well for yourself,” she said, which made him grimace before he turned toward his own horse, a large gray with kind eyes beneath its shaffron. “I’m proud of you. Goddess protect you this day, Liam.”
He swung quickly into the saddle to hide threatening tears. In a moment he was gone, trotting down the slope toward the gathering army in search of his lord. Bear, bouncing out of the night, ran after.
Avani hugged her ribs and listened the wind rattle the baldachin, briefly at a loss as to what to do next. The camp was emptied out, even the servants and tradesmen—those fit enough to hold a weapon—had gone down the hill to join the infantry rallying behind the cavalry. The quartermaster’s tent was left unguarded, the man and his wife and his two grown sons departed to serve the king.
“Will you be wanting a horse, my lady?” Brother Cenwin asked, coming around the baldachin with a fat coastal pony in tow. He had a pack over his shoulder and a fat spell pouch tied to his belt and his book of healing spells under one arm. She was glad to see he had the sense to cover his tonsured head with a kettle helm, twin to Liam’s. “There’s Absen’s mare or Shin’s old gelding if you prefer.”
“Nay,” Avani replied. “But thank you. I’ll go on foot.”
He nodded sagely. “It’s the infantry that takes the brunt of it, or so I’ve read. None of us alive this day have seen war to know for sure, god save us.” He swung into saddle, agile, then tossed her a salute before hurrying on, the pony’s short strides making him bounce.
And then she was alone, but for the ghost pacing in front of the baldachin and a few scattered chickens startled from sleep and come to peck cautiously around the stone well. She glanced at the sky, trying to gauge the time by the stars, but smoke and clouds obscured the sky.
She had a helmet of her own, a barbute from Morgan’s war chest, cut with a wide, Y-shaped opening for her eyes and mouth. She’d declined the matching visor, disliking the constriction. When she tugged it on, the helm caught on the felt skull cap she’d pinned over her hair until she wiggled the helmet side to side. The barbute muffled the wind and the disturbing sounds it carried, for which she was grateful. She wore no other armor—metal was heavy and she relied on her wards inside and out.
She carried her sword, a gift from Mal tempered to her hand when she’d accepted the office of vocent, and a belt knife for cutting bandages. Her own medicinal pouch was not as plump as Cenwin’s, but she wore two full skins of water mixed with strong wine on her belt, which she believed might be far more valuable on the battlefield than the priest’s supply of willow bark for fever or valerian leaf for sleep.
When she whistled for Jacob, he came, flapping clumsily from the roof of the baldachin. Remembering the raven’s grace in her dreaming she suffered a pang of sympathy. He rebuked her concern with a chop of his beak against the top of her helm before settling in on her shoulder, head tucked low.
“Ai, then,” she declared, reconciled. “This is not what I imagined for us the day I found a lonely cottage in a quiet village on the most isolated hills in the kingdom. Nor even the day we took rooms in the palace and I put on vocent black.”
“Tricks,” grumbled Jacob in agreement, pecking at the metal over her right ear. “Cast him out.”
“I dare say we’re giving it our best shot,” retorted Avani as she began to pick her way down the hill. “Mayhap let the Goddess know that for me, just in case she hasn’t noticed, aye?”
The Wythe cavalry line curved from the base of the cliff southwest along Wilhaiim’s eastern flank, one hundred and fifteen lancers deep, stirrup pressed against stirrup. North of the first soldier in line, the forest and jagged mountain met where the white cliffs reached toward the foothills of the northern steppes. South of the final Wythe lancer another cavalryman sat his horse as a garrison line began anew. He wore House Grennich’s device on his shield and on his cape. The mounted Kingsmen each had shield and lance in hand. They were meant to function as a living wall, preventing enemy intrusion while at the same time protecting the infantry massed behind. Armed with sword, lance, and short bow, and dressed in mail head to toe, and mounted on coursers trained to kick and bite, the cavalry was Wilhaiim’s pride and joy. Their predecessors had put down the sidhe, and later protected the city from necromancy gone rogue. Any family with a member in the cavalry had pride of place in unspoken flatland hierarchy, whether that family be tenant farmer or of noble blood. So long as each garrison line worked in kind and did not break, Wilhaiim’s cavalry was a powerful force indeed.
Less so the infantry. Avani, walking amongst the waiting foot soldiers behind the Wythe’s wall of lancers, understood why young Parsnip had hope for a role in the cavalry. The infantry was a ragtag bunch, made up in large part by men and women whose experience on horseback was the family draft horse ridden from farm to market, and who hadn’t the education needed to win an officer’s medal. Some were Kingsmen in truth, trained to the sword in the royal barracks, and kitted out in bits and pieces of armor on the throne’s indulgence. They knew how to use blade and fists and carried the light, round wooden bucklers more suitable to ground war. They wore good leather boots, also at the throne’s indulgence, and simple metal sallets to protect their heads, and their weapons were in good repair. The officers amongst them wore a tunic fashioned in the king’s scarlet over their jerkins.
The rest of the infantry, and as far as Avani could tell the vast majority, was made up of villeins drafted from Wythe’s fields and surrounding hamlets. They had farmers’ clogs if they had any shoes at all, and held pitchforks, cleavers, boning knives, and small swords for weapons. Some still wore the wide-brimmed straw hats used for working in the fields under a summer sun. Others had donned makeshift armor tacked together out of pieces of leather and fur and even burlap. A few had sacrificed dignity for safety and wore iron cook pots on their head to cover their vulnerable skulls.
They were a disparate lot but resigned to their fate, standing silently except for the occasional cough or mutter as they waited for battle to come their way. Avani stood with them, between a farmer with a long skinning knife clutched in her hand and a grandfather with a rusted scythe gripped in his, and tried to see anything past the horse and riders ranged ahead. In the dark and the smoke with the helmet to muffle her ears, it seemed the most helpless of choices, watching and waiting for danger that was yet only distant flame and voices carried on the wind. She marveled at the courage of the men and women ranged around her; her heart was in her throat, her sword drawn though she’d meant to use her wards for defense and her hands only for healing.
Death came from the west with trumpets and drums, the horns sounding from far too near and then one hundred and fifteen soldiers away, at the garrison next door. Wythe heralds blew an answering call, and the Kingsman in front of Avani stood in his stirrups to get a better look, leather creaking. He was a large man made larger by mail and shield.
“Bloody buggering Skald,” he reported as calmly as if he were sighting a sudden rain cloud on an otherwise sunny day, “bastards shooting fire off their horses. No wonder the countryside went up overnight like Mabon festival come early.” He sat again in his saddle, adjusted his shield and settled his lance across his forearm. “Ready up, lads and lasses, it’s time to prove your mettle. Here they come!”
Avani thought she could hear Morgan’s shrill voice over the groan and creak of cavalry preparing. Jacob bounced on her shoulder, croaking excitement. The grandfather on her right side kissed the blade of his scythe, tears streaming down his wrinkled cheeks, catching the orange flash of flaming arrows loosed in a volley over their heads. Someone in the crowd screamed. Someone else began to laugh nervously. The woman with the skinning knife howled, “For the king! For Wilhaiim! For Wythe!” and her call was quickly taken up on either side. Another blast of trumpets, a second volley of deadly arrows in the night sky, and then the cavalry plunged ahead, a first feint.
The infantry, more screaming mob than organized contingent, hurtled after, dragging Avani and Jacob along.