“Knotcreek, Selkirk, Black Abbey—their fields and hamlets are burning all about, my lord, they’re pinned between fire and water.”
Mal, perched on one of the wide steps beneath Renault’s throne, rose to pour wine into one of the silver goblets always at hand. He passed the goblet over.
“Drink up, Russel,” he ordered. “And sit, before you collapse. The steps are not so comfortable as the throne, but they’ll do for the likes of you and me.”
Russel cupped the chalice in both hands and gulped wine. She stank of death and smoke. Her leather armor was pocked in places with new burns and her face was reddened as if she’d stood too long outside in a midsummer heat. Splashes of blood were drying on her boots and thighs. She wore a hastily knotted bandage on her sword arm.
As she drank she stared over the edge of the chalice at the oriel where Renault waited for the sun to rise on his kingdom and better reveal their losses. Brother Tillion knelt near the king, quietly praying. Despite Mal’s misgivings Renault refused to send Tillion away. Oddly, the theist’s presence seemed to comfort Renault.
Arthur and Parsnip, curled together, slept on the floor near one of the throne room’s gigantic hearthstones. The grate was cold. Renault had ordered the fires put out as the flames on the midnight horizon grew in size and number.
Runners had stopped coming in from the coast hours earlier, unable to make it past flame or around the constantly moving influx of invaders. Until recently messenger birds had managed to find the castle despite desert arrows but as dawn approached the wind had grown in force until the city shook and sighed and any winged creature would surely need to find shelter out of the storm.
“You’re a marvel, Corporal.” Mal dipped his head in grudging acknowledgement. “Were I you, I would have gone to ground as soon as I realized I was trapped behind enemy lines.”
“That’s just it.” She spoke to Mal but continued to look Renault’s way. “There isn’t any enemy line, so to speak. As far as I can tell they hit the ground hard and scattered, one by one or in small groups. They’re there and then gone and leaving fire behind.” She indicated the bandage on her arm. “Some sort of resin, my lord, sticky and flammable and difficult to stomp out. If you ask me, the sea lords are in finer place, safe behind their walls and the water close at hand. They’ll not burn so long as they can keep the bucket brigades going. It’s the rest of us I’m worried about. Up in a gout of fire like Whitcomb and the sea too far away to save us.”
She sat down suddenly, taking the lowest step on the dais, and stretched out her legs. Her hands trembled. Mal retrieved her cup and filled it again, but only halfway. He doubted she had thought to eat since she’d ridden west with Lory and Martin a day earlier. She wouldn’t thank him for getting her wine-drunk.
“Whitcomb was brick and clapboard,” said Renault from the oriel. “We are stone and mortar. There are two thousand good soldiers between us and conflagration.”
“From what I’ve heard the sand snakes are five times that, Majesty,” Russel replied. “They don’t intend to fight honorably, if the desert even has notion of virtue on the battleground. And there’s more.” She hesitated, frowning at something only she could see.
“Speak,” prompted Mal.
“A creature in the air.” Russel’s scowl deepened. “On the wing, flying above the smoke. A monster with a colossal serpent’s tail. Black as the night sky and difficult to know for sure, but I think—” Now she did look at Mal, a quick, speculative glance “—it plucked soldiers randomly off the ground, Kingsmen and kilted warriors alike, ripped them to bits with no rhyme nor reason nor allegiance that I could tell.”
“Wyvern,” suggested Arthur, sitting up all at once. Parsnip sighed and snuffled. “A dragon, my lord!” His eyes shone.
“There are no such things as dragons.” Renault left the darkened oriel for the brighter light near his throne. “A wyvern is only a fanciful creature used by mothers and fathers to frighten young lads and lasses into good behavior, like the basilisk or the unicorn.”
Arthur’s face fell. Russel rose to greet her king.
“Even so, Your Majesty,” she said. “I saw it with mine own eyes, whatever it was, tearing men to gristle and tossing their parts at the fires.” She swallowed. “The things, of late, in the forest—the reports of wolves and giant owls and six-legged hogs—”
“Sidhe beasts grown daring,” agreed Mal. His heart sank. “Mayhap wakened by the sounds of war. Too much to hope we’d escape their attention, what with the desert riding rampant through their realm.” A half-remembered dream surfaced suddenly, a recollection of barrowmen standing on an island beneath the earth, surrounded by a dark lake, and overhead a ceiling of false amber stars.
“Am I to fight sidhe and the desert both?” demanded Renault. “If so, we are indeed lost. It took a company of magi and a continent of iron to beat the barrowmen into the ground. Mayhap, if we were not already divided by sand snakes, but even then, Mal is only one man.” He pulled at his beard, distracted.
“The one god will provide.” Brother Tillion limped around the side of the throne. He walked tall, Mal noticed, and did not make use of his heavy staff for balance, though his step was short and uneven. “One way or another.” He smiled at Mal, thin-lipped and solemn. “So long as the correct sacrifices are made.”
Mal wished Baldebert was not already gone to battle with his band of bloodthirsty sailors. The infantry would improve for having the admiral and his cohorts on hand, but Baldebert knew how to cow the temple’s overt xenophobia with a sharp word or snide grin. Mal, who would very much have liked to knock the theist off his pedestal, real or imaginary, was constrained by court protocol.
Renault dropped onto his throne, knocking both fists restlessly on the gray stone seat. “Send for Masterhealer Orat,” he decided. “If he thinks the one god can yet save us, I’m willing to listen.” He lifted a finger, forestalling Mal’s protest. “Roue has become a moot point. If Orat truly believes our survival depends upon my choice of bride, I am desperate enough to be convinced.”
“You will break your word?” Mal demanded. “Does not your god counsel equally against faithlessness, Brother Tillion?”
“His Majesty’s faith is between himself and the god,” Tillion returned smoothly, ignoring Mal’s snarl of disbelief. “I will send for the Masterhealer. He will gladly hear your concerns, Majesty.” He descended the dais slowly, smiling again as he passed Mal.
“Malachi,” Renault cautioned Mal. “Attend me. Russel. To bed with you, until dawn. In the morning, I’ll have need of you again.”
Mal stood one step below the throne, head bowed, as Russel trailed Tillion from the room. He spread his gloved hands before him in the air, flexing fingers one after another in a bid for patience until the heavy doors boomed shut and liveried Kingsmen took up their places in front of the double portal. But for the guards ranged about the long room, and the two children on the hearth, the king and his vocent were alone.
“Speak to me about faithlessness, brother,” Renault said after a beat of silence. “Specifically, yours.”
Mal caught his breath, lifting his head. He’d not expected discovery so soon; he and Baldebert had been careful and clever, and the one flaw in his plan—the capricious link he and Avani had forged, her window into his head—seemed to have been solved for him, if without his consent. He both resented and admired the cage Avani had woven around her mind and heart. It was not dissimilar to the wards conjured to protect physical body or royal keep, a sparkling net around the core of her that kept invaders out and her private self contained. Reaching across the link now was like grasping a hot coal with bare hands; he was allowed an instant of connection before pain struck. He knew that she was alive and well and yet with Wythe, but more than that was denied to him.
Not once in all Mal’s study had he any indication that external wards could be made internal, nor that the stolid protection cants Andrew so relied upon to shield his mind from angry, intrusive dead were but ineffective, primitive fencing compared to Avani’s silver net. Given the chance, he very much would have liked to learn the way of it.
That chance, he knew, had passed.
“Mal,” Renault prompted. “Do not pretend ignorance. I know you too well. Confess—” He leaned forward in the throne, elbows on knees. “You intend to break faith with me the moment my back is turned.”
“I—” Mouth dry, Mal cleared his throat. Renault did not look as though he intended to have Mal’s head immediately on a pike for the treason of reviving ferric soldiers. Instead his expression was one of profound regret. “I would not—”
"I understand you would far prefer a chance at proving yourself as my champion on the field,” Renault continued quietly. “That as my vocent you suppose you belong on the front line. I can see how you chafe at this confinement. But, brother, if Baldebert has taught us anything, it’s how easily you can be snatched away. I will not lose my most precious asset to death or, worse, captivity. If we outlive these sand snakes and their ambition, Wilhaiim will need your particular faculties.” He sat back. “Even more so now that Avani has refused allegiance.”
Mal bowed his head for fear Renault would glimpse his anguish. “It is true, Majesty,” he said. A lie spoken seemed crueler than a lie of omission. “That I believe a magus may indeed be more useful amongst the troops than in the palace.”
“And if I had more than one at hand I would send you out,” Renault assured him. “But you are, despite my best efforts, still the last of your kind. Like Parsnip and Arthur, you are most valuable here, at my side. I, also, would prefer to ride to glory, sword in hand and Kingsmen in my wake. And if I had an heir, mayhap—” He shook his head. “I expect we, the four of us, have the most difficult job of it, the waiting and wondering.” He rose. “Join me before the windows. The sun will rise soon enough. Shall we watch and wait together? Would you like that?”
“Aye, Majesty,” Mal replied, “I would like that very much.”
With the dawn came a messenger bird, a black-beaked peregrine from the west. Renault and Mal watched the falcon fight the wind, skewing this way and that as it strove to reach the royal mews. Behind it the sky was gray and orange with soot, storm, and sunrise. Wilhaiim’s white walls were smudged black in the falling ash. It was a grim panorama. Renault stood with his hands clenched at his sides as he had for most of the night. Arthur and Parsnip had left the hearth for an apple shared out between them near the throne. Brother Orat was yet to pay His Majesty a visit. Mal wondered, cynically, whether the man was in deep communion with his god or if he was afraid to leave the temple’s shelter for fumy streets.
“If not for your assurances,” Renault said as the peregrine found its way out of the wind and into the mews. “I would believe we were the last living things in an inferno.”
“Nay,” replied Mal. If he let his concentration slip only a hairsbreadth he could see them all in his head, flashpoints of life struggling to continue, the ordered stars that meant most of Wilhaiim’s lines still held, and the less disciplined swirl and strike of some ten thousand warriors rampaging between coast and forest. A map of vitality, it was more efficient even than being midst-war, and more dangerous. Each time he took stock it was harder to come back without first sampling that bright energy.
If he swallowed the desert army in one gulp, he wondered, would he survive the experience? Would he be raised to godhood in the consuming, or be scorched in gluttony and fall, yet more gray ash, from the sky?
“What losses do you see?” Renault pressed. “What numbers? What do you see?”
“At this distance I cannot count the dead,” Mal confessed. “Only the living. And there is no way to differentiate Kingsman from sand snake. One mortal life is as beautiful as the next.” He licked his lips, parched, and turned abruptly away. “Too many to know for sure even if they would consent to stay still for me to enumerate.”
“What about the wyvern?” Parsnip asked around a mouthful of apple. “Is it there?”
“If there is such a thing,” Mal said, “I cannot sense it.”
“Here comes a man from the mews.” Renault left the windows for his throne but did not sit. “I don’t expect it will be good news.”
They waited without speaking until the double portal split and the runner burst through, out of breath, eyes streaming from the smoke. Ash dulled the man’s dark hair and scarlet livery. He clutched a scroll. He barely had the time to essay a bow before Renault snatched it from his hand. Breaking the seal—black wax stamped with Knotcreek’s Three-Masted Ship—the king unrolled the message and began to read.
“Whitcomb is destroyed, as we feared,” he reported. “Michaelmas writes that the first wave came up out of a hole in the ground near Bracken Keep and decamped east and south from there, lighting fires as they went. The grape fields are gone, the town leveled. God willing our people were safely evacuated in time. Michaelmas has some thirty survivors in hand and hopes that Bracken has the rest, but there’s been no word yet from Kingsmen Weatherford who holds it yet for the throne.” He crumpled the missive in his hand, regarded the runner. “Nothing from my more southern holds?”
The runner, down on one knee, was still trying to catch his breath. “Not yet, my liege. But the wind is dying, some. The birds will have a better time of it. My mistress has sent up more just this morning, to Wythe and Burl, and the rest.”
The king nodded. He walked another circuit from his throne and around the oriel, before making his decision.
“I mean to go and inspect the battlements until those birds return with news,” he said. “From there, at least, I’ll have a better grasp of whether the tide turns with us or against. And it will do the infantry good to see me; mayhap I’ll walk amongst them if there is an ebb in battle.”
Mal refrained from chastising his king in front of children and soldiers, but with effort. Renault grimaced in his direction as he descended the steps.
“I will avoid flaming arrows and well-thrown pikes and even Russel’s flying monster,” he promised. “Will you walk with me, brother, or stay?”
“Go,” Mal hedged, “I have other things to attend.”
“Do not wander far,” His Majesty advised. As he crossed the long room Kingsmen peeled from the walls and fell behind all in a row. “I will have need of you once I’ve seen how things stand. Tell Orat when he comes to meet me on the battlements.”
Mal, who knew very well how things stood, bowed from the waist. Renault took the obeisance as expected. Mal meant it as farewell.
Mal left Parsnip and Arthur sitting on the steps beneath the throne after extracting promises of good behavior. Parsnip was not as easily fooled as Renault.
“You can take my ax, if you like, my lord,” she offered quietly. “I don’t expect it will do you much good against dragons, but it’s got a strong iron blade and that’s all a soldier needs against man or sidhe.”
“Thank you.” He gave her suggestion the same serious consideration she’d taken before making it. “But I hope to stay out of range of man or sidhe.”
“His Majesty will be very angry, my lord, once he realizes you’ve run off.”
“He will,” confirmed Mal. “But only because he’s a good man who confuses heartache with temper.”
“Shall we tell him you’re sorry?” Arthur wondered.
“Nay. Never lie to your king,” Mal said. “Not even to save his pride.”
In his room, he dressed for war, though in truth he did think he would have no need of sword or helm or iron cuirass over Hennish leather. For practical reasons, he eschewed the vocent’s cloak. He tucked a capsule of Curcas seed up his sleeve in case he survived long enough to see his own execution and courage failed him at the end. Until recently he had not thought of himself as a coward, but Holder’s burned magus had struck him to the core, and he could not quite shake a creeping horror of his own death.
Baldebert’s sapphire-and-bone pin was on his mantel. Mal picked it up, turned it over, then set it back in place. Baldebert had no need of the brooch any longer and eventually, when Renault thought to search the tower, he would find it there. He left it on the mantel next to the jeweled knife that was a wedding gift from Siobahn and a single inky raven’s feather.
He snuffed the candles in the colored glass lanterns he’d carried with him all the way from childhood, then took one last look around the tower room: the four-poster bed with its green hangings beckoned, the old wooden desk and his beloved leather chair. His journal sat, closed, next to the silver inkwell and ebony stylus he’d used to record a life spent in the service of the throne. There was a letter for Avani there, too, written in the loneliest hours when sleep was elusive. He expected she knew his sentiments as well as her own, no matter how she pretended ignorance, but selfishly he hoped she would keep his words by her always after, and think of him fondly.
At the last moment, he eschewed the helm, disliking the way it constrained his line of sight, and left it on the desk.
The corridor outside was quiet. He locked the chamber door with a key instead of the usual cant. His boots made no sound on thick carpet as he walked the empty hall. The tower stairwell was cold and filled with haze blown in through the loopholes. He could hear the clash and cry of battle outside the city. War did not stop with the sunrise.
He stopped outside the throne room to deliver his key to the Kingsman on guard.
“See that His Majesty gets this when he returns from his walk,” he told her.
“Yes, my lord.” She was too well trained to ask questions and for that he was grateful. She folded the key into her sleeve, awarding him a bow. “Of course, my lord.”
The great hall was deserted except for a handful of servants left behind to care for the king and those members of his court too elderly or infirm to take up sword. They stopped to gawp as Mal swept past, unused to seeing their magus in armor. He exited the palace by way of the front doors. The men and women standing guard outside clicked their heels together in his wake. The haze in the bailey was not yet so bad as it had been during the Red Worm plague when for days the temple had burned corpses right outside the city walls, but it would soon become worse, he thought, if the wind did not let up and fields and flatland continued to burn.
As Mal walked desolate castle streets in the direction of the Maiden Gate, archers aligned on the battlements let loose red-fletched missiles into the horizon or called down encouragement to their compatriots below. From their jovial shouts and friendly taunting he guessed that the brunt of the battle had not yet reached Wilhaiim proper and that the cavalry line continued, for the moment, to hold. If the sand snakes had come up all together west of Whitcomb and through only the one gate, then the flatlanders had enjoyed a stroke of luck beyond any Mal could hope for.
Too good, he surmised, to be true. The day was only beginning. Mayhap the enemy was waiting on better light to begin anew.
He crossed in front of the royal temple. Its louvered roof was closed, its doors shut tight. A group of refugees from outside the city huddled against the building, seeking relief from biting wind and the raining ash. They looked down on Mal and, recognizing his face, called frantic questions.
“My lord, Lord Malachi! The temple is full to bursting, my lord, and every tavern and inn! Where are we to go when the walls come down? My lord, who will protect us if not the god and his theists?”
They were only a small group, lately arrived. Vineyard workers, he deduced, from the dark stains on their hands evident even from a distance. Five men and six women, they were soot stained and frightened, and by all appearances had come into Wilhaiim with only the clothes on their backs.
“Have you come from the coast?” he asked, lifting his voice to be heard over the shouts from the wall and the scrape of the wind. “How goes it, there?”
“Badly.” One of the men came down the temple steps, rolling the edge of his tunic nervously in both hands. “The keeps still stand, god willing, but the rest is gone, razed or looted or both. They came out of the night on foot and on ponies, ponies of our own breeding, my lord—good, sturdy animals—and slaughtered people in their beds, my lord.” He rubbed his eyes, knuckling away moisture. “All of Whitcomb, gone, blood in the streets and on the dunes.”
“You escaped.” Another stroke of luck, Mal thought, too good to be true. “How?”
“The king’s constable, my lord,” the man replied, awestruck. “She came for us into Whitcomb, herself and a troop of good horsemen, scooped up those of us still standing and ran us back to the western gate.”
“Countess Wythe broke the line,” Mal repeated coldly.
“Aye, my lord, and we’re grateful for it.” The man indicated his companions where they cowered against the temple wall. “It was a near thing. All eleven of us would be dead but for her courage. We owe her our lives.”
“She risked all of Wilhaiim for the sake of eleven Whitcomb vineyard workers.”
The man winced. “Aye, my lord. Though I suppose she hoped there were more than eleven of us still alive when she thought of it.”
“She should not be thinking past the wall she guards,” retorted Mal. The wind gusted in reply, sending billows of ash across the temple steps. “Find your way to the Royal Gardens, all eleven of you. There is a refugee camp set up there, near the barracks tower. There you will be fed and armed, if there are weapons left.”
“But, my lord, what if they breach the gates? Will we not be safer inside the temple?”
“They will not breach the gates,” snapped Mal, glowering at the man. “The wards bound into the stanchion are strong still. I’ve made sure of it. So long as every person does his part as required, including the bloody Countess Wythe, the city will hold.”
“Aye, my lord,” the farmer answered, although with a dubious shake of his head, before running back up the steps to join his companions in good fortune. Unexpected fury made the tips of Mal’s fingers smart. He buried them in his armpits, tight fists, to smother sparks. Turning his back on the temple, he marched on.
The Maiden Gate was locked down, the portcullis lowered, the murder hatch open to the battlement above. A band of infantrymen stood just inside the portcullis, blocking egress. Through the bars Mal could see the backs of soldiers and horses—the eastern line standing in wait. He could hear the hiss of missiles let go all at once from the battlements and then the blast of trumpets. The captain at the gate drew his sword as Mal approached then puffed out a breath in relief.
“Lord Vocent.” He saluted in lieu of a bow. “We’ve just had word. There’s another lot come up from the south near the wood; they’ll be on us any minute now, Skald take them and break them.” The man grinned, revealing gaps where his front teeth had at some point in his career been knocked out. “But don’t fret. We’re ready.”
“Excellent,” replied Mal, dry as blowing soot. “I’m going out.”
The captain’s grin wobbled. “We’ve orders to keep everyone in. Come direct from the throne, my lord.”
Mal drew murk from the crevices under the gate and used it to grow tall. “I’m going out.”
It was basic showmanship, but the guard took a step back. Mal could smell the metallic tang of his distress. Whatever he saw in Mal’s eyes or in the cape of roiling, angry shadows changed his mind. He sheathed his sword.
“Through the guard tower, then, my lord. I canna open the portcullis. This way.”
He led Mal past the infantrymen and into the right-side tower. There another guardsman, standing at attention between stacked barrels of Low Port tar, kept watch over the winch used to open the gate. The captain made straight for a thick wooden door, twin to the one they’d just come through and barred three times with padlocked iron. He wrapped his fist on the wood, loud enough to be heard on the other side of the wall.
“Coming through! Georges!” he hollered as he opened the padlocks. “Do you hear me, man? One to come through! Move out of the way!”
The door cracked open. A soldier in ash-dusted infantry togs thrust his head through the gap. Behind him in the morning horses danced anticipation and soldiers cursed roundly at less bold farm folk who wavered in the face of rising wind and smoke.
“What’s all this, Pietre? You know we’re not to let anyone out or in.” The infantryman spat his displeasure in a wad of dark spittle onto the floor of the guardroom. When he saw Mal, he froze, aghast.
“Opion.” Mal regarded the tainted spittle by his boot with loathing before studying the pin and badge on the man’s breast: Black Abbey. “I should have your commission for indulging on duty.”
“Opion’s no offense, no more’n ale in a flask to make a long night tolerable, my lord. The priests hand it out to help with pain and the nerves, and thank the god for that.” Pupils turned to pinpoints, Georges was too far gone to realize his danger. The drug blunted his senses and loosened his tongue, allowing for indiscretion. “You won’t take back my commission, not today—you can’t spare even one swordsman against odds like these.”
Khorit Dard had used opion to turn fierce desert mercenaries into slaves willing and eager to die for the sake of Roue’s flower fields. The poppy flowers, while reputedly beautiful to look upon and worth their weight in true gold, had nearly put an end to Roue. If not for the Rani’s determination, Baldebert’s initiative, and Mal’s talents as an assassin, the small kingdom would surely have fallen to sand lords and opion traders.
While he’d long suspected that the theists eased their most difficult patients with the drug, and had turned a blind eye to the practice for the sake of compassion, Mal did not intend to let the poisonous habit spread throughout Wilhaiim. As far as he was concerned opion, while not so quick to kill, was in the end just as deadly as Curcas seed.
Mal widened the crack between door and threshold with a swift kick, reached through the opening, and ripped pin and badge from the Georges’ breast, tearing fabric. With the medals, he stole the far more valuable honor of the fellow’s remaining years, syphoning life until the soldier, mouth working in mute astonishment, collapsed to his knees, falling through the door into the tower. Georges was still alive, but barely. His poached vitality fizzed through Mal, a heady rush.
“One way or another, opion will kill a man.” He gazed down at gap-toothed Pietre where he knelt on the floor, chafing Georges’s wrists. “Were I you, I’d stick to ale.” He stepped across the fallen man. “Pull him through and bar the door.”
Pietre, white-faced, had the sense to do as he was told. Mal waited until he heard the thunk of iron dropped into place on the other side of the door before confronting the line. Wielding still his cloak of shadows, Georges’s energy flushing his cheeks and turning his insides giddy, he scanned the mass of stinking humanity charged with defending Wilhaiim’s walls.
They were Black Abbey infantry: Kingsmen, villein, tradesmen, and tinkers. A hardy people used to subsisting off a sometimes-fickle farmland. They were away from home, enduring hardship and facing mortality. What they knew of Wilhaiim’s magus they’d heard, for the most part, third-hand. They were prepared for awe. If any realized they’d just observed murder they were prepared to give the most powerful man in the kingdom the benefit of doubt.
The looks turned his way were equal parts quiet adulation and fear. He let them stare, allowing himself one last moment of vanity before it all went to pieces. While Black Abbey ogled, he took a moment to observe the state of their garrison, the cavalry on their horses, the archers on the battlements above his head, the wind plucking at plumes and pennants and making the sounds of battle seem at first near and then far. He could not determine for certain from which direction the smoke came, if it was only from the west as expected, or if the situation had changed overnight.
“What’s the word?” he shouted up at the wall.
A Kingsman peered down, pike in hand.
“Within the hour, my lord,” she shouted back. “Wind’s making it difficult to get news, or see anything past the highway. But Wythe’s sent a runner—more of the bastards have come up along the edge of the wood, through another hole in the ground. They’ll be heading our way anytime. We’re ready. Black Abbey won’t break.”
Her confidence made the eavesdropping infantry whoop and stamp their feet. Mal nodded, pleased. He left the protection of the wall for the cavalry blockade—“Let me through, thank you, make way”—speaking softly to courser and lancer as he slipped between stirrups, patting withers as he squeezed through the barricade of horseflesh and mail. They opened around him and then closed immediately after.
Once free of the line he was alone, exposed, the highway under his boots. Haze obscured the horizon but for a few feet in either direction. He held out a hand, checking for ash, but the wind had shifted and he did not think the western fires were yet close.
“Hold your fire!” Someone cautioned from the battlements. “By the Virgin! That’s our man, you fool. Don’t shoot!”
Which recalled Mal to the present danger. He let go the shadows and conjured wards instead, silver-green in the smoke. He unsheathed his sword though he had not lied to Parsnip—he did not plan to get so close to anyone as to put it to use. He closed his eyes just briefly, reviewing the constellation in his head. A new cluster of stars expanded to the east, the enemy increasing. East was where Earl Wythe was stationed and Liam and Avani. He resisted the temptation to follow the link in that direction. She blocked him still.
Always? he wondered bitterly, but she did not relent or let him peek through her eyes.
It did not matter. She could look after herself, and his business was south.
He walked for a while along the highway a nose length in front of the cavalry. If they could see him, the archers on the wall would not waste precious artillery. The horses snorted in his direction, no doubt thinking Mal a ghost come out of the morning. If he closed his eyes the lancers were an incandescence in their saddles. Pride swelled behind his breastbone. They were beautiful.
Squatter’s row was gone, crushed beneath the line, hovels scattered. He hoped its residents were safely inside the city walls and not winding down their final frail hours with makeshift weapons in hand. But for Gerald Doyle’s kindness in taking a broken boy in from the Rose Keep, Mal thought, he might have ended up in a similar situation: homeless and hopeless, often out of his mind—if he had managed to live so long.
He found his way through the haze to Flossy Creek, leaving Wilhaiim behind. On the other side of the merry water Rowan stepped out of a fallow field and walked at his side.
“You’re worse,” Mal said without rancor. “Than Siobahn ever was.”
“I know you’ve begun to worry she might have been like me,” Rowan replied. He walked with his hands folded behind his back, barefoot, a furrow between his eyes. “Madness personified and not a dead thing walking.”
“Avani saw her,” argued Mal. “Spoke to her. And the sidhe.”
Rowan grunted. “What’s to say they wouldn’t me, if you wanted it? You were odd even as a child, Mal. Talking to people that weren’t there. Pretending to play games with lads and lasses I couldn’t see.”
“Ghosts,” retorted Mal. “Just ghosts.”
“Mebbe. But you’re worried.”
“It hardly matters now, I think.”
“Aye.” Rowan blew out through his nose. “Are you sure you want this? Absolutely sure—”
“Quiet!” snapped Mal. “Listen!”
The wind, capricious, blew now from the northeast, and with it came increasing sounds of combat. The noise of horses and soldiers in distress, the clash of blade on blade, screams of triumph and despair. One second he thought the battle was upon him, the next, wind and smoke made it difficult to tell. He crouched in the road to check the ground for vibration and in doing so avoided a flock of iridescent arrows come out of the murk. Their tips burned a pungent flame and where they landed tiny fires struck up.
“Fuck me,” gasped Rowan, squatting beside Mal. “That was close.”
“Don’t move,” said Mal, forgetting for a heartbeat that Rowan was just a symptom of his deterioration. He pressed his hand to the ground. “They’re here.”
The desert blew out of the smoke on a gust of wind, more than one hundred kilted warriors thundering across the field on coastal ponies. The sand snakes nocked arrow after arrow as they surged toward the Maiden Gate, kindling fires as they went. They were silent as they rode, yellow eyes fierce. The cacophony came from those giving chase, soldiers on foot and on coursers, racing in pursuit. Few of the cavalrymen still held their lances; most chased with sword in hand. They flew Wythe’s ragged pennant.
The men and women on foot were struggling, bloodied and wild faced. One man loped past, badly burned and wheezing, pitchfork in hand. He blinked to see Mal squatting in the dirt.
“Don’t just sit there pissing yerself,” he said. “Wythe’s gone and Black Abbey’s next. Make yourself useful, man. Die like you mean it.”
“Fuck me,” Rowan said again, with more spirit. He waited for a break in the charge then grabbed at Mal’s sleeve. “Let’s go.”
“Wait. One moment.” Shaking Rowan off, Mal clapped palms over his ears to block out his surroundings.
Wythe’s gone. Black Abbey’s next.
It was a terrible gamble, snuffing lives without first being sure of his choices, and he knew there would be mistakes made. But there wasn’t time to be certain. He wouldn’t second-guess intuition. He had, after all, just seen them ride past. He should be able to get it mostly right.
He found them in his head, a clot of one hundred or more vivid arid suns, lives well spent, lives wasted, lives hardly begun and those near their ending. He flexed his fingers over his ears, a clenching of power.
They extinguished all at once.
But not gone, oh not gone. He swallowed them whole and they filled him to brimming, knocking him over in the dirt where he lay curled, breathing through bliss.
When it was over Rowan gave him a hand up.
“Aye, that’s that,” Rowan said, reaching out to brush broken wheat from Mal’s curls. “Now you’ve sealed it. Even Renault won’t be able to look past that display.”
“Keep the Curcas handy.” Mal bit his tongue to keep back an inappropriate snort of laughter. “Terror makes good men do bad things. I suspect by the time I’m finished, the court will be ready to do their worst.”