Lady Knight

  Kel dismounted. She fumbled the reins as she looped them around Hoshi’s saddle horn. With Jump at her heels, she climbed one of the stairs to the ramparts.

  “Dismount and fan out,” she heard Wyldon order. “Let’s have the wounded and the dead laid out here by the gate. Search every building.”

  Kel stopped halfway up the stair. On one side of the hole where the gate had stood was a maroon-and -brown pile. There Oluf’s cold, dead face, his eyes wide, seemed to stare right at her. He lay on a stack of dead men, all in army maroon. A massive sword cut opened his chest, telling Kel how he’d died.

  I never liked him, she thought distantly. He beat the convicts until I stopped him. But he fought for us. He fought for us, and they threw him on a pile like trash.

  She finished the climb to the ramparts. The sparrows met her there, perching on the sharpened logs. Dead soldiers and civilians littered the walkway. Many sprouted arrows as porcupines sprouted quills. She and Jump walked the entire circuit of the camp on the walkway they’d fixed after Numair had dropped logs on it. She recognized everyone she saw. This fellow mashed all of the food on his plate into a single mound, then ate it as if it might be snatched away. His throat had been slashed. This woman often sang counterpoint with Tobe, her mellow alto voice intertwined with his pure soprano. She had been cut in two at the waist, probably by the killing device ensnared beside her. It had gotten one hand free of the net that trapped it, enough to kill the singer before someone opened its head with a pickaxe. This man had been handsome before summer’s heat bloated his dead face. He’d been much sought by the girls, but Kel had seen him with a lover, a man, hiding in the shadows one night as she walked the camp. He at least had been shot, not cut up by killing devices. Others on the walkway had lost their heads or an arm or both legs. Blood had dried everywhere on the wall and on the planks under Kel’s feet. Stormwings had left their unmistakable mark on all of the dead, here and on the ground. The stench coated her tongue, throat, and nostrils.

  She finished her circuit of the camp and descended the stairs near headquarters and the ruin of the infirmary. She had counted more than fifty dead on the walkway, soldiers and civilians shot or cut apart by killing devices. The pile on which Oluf lay looked to hold about ten bodies. Sixty or so dead, most of them soldiers, out of nearly five hundred people, Kel figured. Where were the rest?

  Sunlight on steel lanced her eyes. A Stormwing glided down until she landed in front of Kel.

  Kel locked her hands behind her back. The last thing she wanted right now was a chat with a Stormwing. This one had bronze skin a little darker than that of the Yamanis, with similar wide, almond-shaped brown eyes. Had she been human, she might have been attractive in a cold way, Kel thought, noting the creature’s cap of glossy black hair roughly cropped around a small, well-shaped head. Her mouth was plush, her face marked by high cheekbones and a small, rounded chin. It was the rest of her that Kel loathed, the steel and human flesh streaked with reeking fluids.

  “We are sorry about this, a little,” she said, spreading her metal wings to indicate the ruin around them. “We were not certain if the rules applied, this being a refugee camp, not exactly a fort.” The creature frowned. “But then the enemy came with their weapons, and their giant metal insects, and their shamans. Your people included soldiers, they carried weapons . . .” The Stormwing shrugged. “We did what we live to do. It is the first proper feast that we’ve had in this place, without you to run us off.”

  A dagger of something white-hot pierced the ice that had encased Kel since she had woken that morning. She took a step toward the creature. “And it meant nothing to you, that my people took up weapons, and fought for their lives, and their families, and their home, when otherwise they’d never fight at all.”

  The Stormwing shrugged again, light rippling over her feathers. “I said we were sorry. If only you were not stingy, perhaps we might have held off. Practically everyone else lets us have the enemy dead, at least.”

  “The enemy dead,” Kel repeated with numb lips. “They let you have the enemy dead.”

  “Who cares about the enemy?” the Stormwing wanted to know. “Probably just you.” She smiled cruelly. “We are done now. You may bury what is left.” She took off, half blinding onlookers with the sunlight reflected by her wings.

  While Kel had been circling Haven on the walls, Lord Wyldon’s men had searched the buildings for survivors. No one had entered headquarters yet. Jump whined as he and Kel approached the building.

  “I must,” she told him gently. The sparrows fluttered down, some landing on the headquarters hitching posts, some on Kel. “Where are the others?” she asked the birds. “Merric and his soldiers? Find them. They would have been on patrol.”

  Nari, clinging to Kel’s tunic, peeped. The birds took to the air.

  Kel walked into headquarters. She found Zamiel fallen on top of his desk in the clerks’ office, a pile of reports under him, a sword in one hand. He was the worst swordsman I’ve ever seen, Kel thought, her heart locked in ice. He made sure Tobe got out, but he didn’t run himself.

  She went into her bedroom and dragged her blanket from her cot. With it she covered Zamiel, tucking it gently around his body. At least the Stormwings hadn’t found him.

  Except for Zamiel, the clerks’ office was empty. The room where the command staff held their nightly meetings was deserted. She climbed the stairs to see the guest quarters and the storeroom. They were empty, the storeroom cleared of supplies. She found no bodies. Where were Gragur, Hildurra, and the other clerks? Where were the children who carried their messages through the camp?

  She went out the back to be confronted by the smoking heap of the infirmary. One of the Goatstrack midwives Neal had once called a “crabby old besom” lay across what had been the door. Three dead Scanrans were sprawled in front of her with no wounds but those inflicted by Stormwings after their hearts had ceased to beat. Kel had known the woman had a magical Gift for healing but not that she could wield death as well. She was cut nearly in two from behind. Apparently a killing device had ended her life, not another human.

  Neal leaned against headquarters, weeping silently. Kel gave him a handkerchief. Shock still gripped her.

  From the infirmary she walked the camp building by building, her eyes and nose burning from smoke. Inside, the barracks floors and walls were only scorched, tribute to the power in Numair’s spells against fire, but the refugees’ belongings lay in black and ashy heaps.

  She found one more lifeless killing device behind the latrine. It lay half free of the metal-and-hemp net the defenders had tossed over it. Its arms were free. Kel wondered how anyone had gotten close enough to crack the dome. She crouched to inspect it and found that a sparrow had wedged himself into one of the device’s eyepits. On that side the thing’s dome had been smashed in to free the captive spirit. Kel guessed the weapon had been an axe. The impact had crushed the bird. He’d given his life so a human could attack the device on its blind side and kill it.

  Kel gently extracted the sparrow from its metal tomb. “Daine was right,” she whispered softly. “We do you no favors, teaching you to think like us.” She wrapped the bird in one of her spare handkerchiefs and used her dagger to dig a grave for him.

  Wyldon, his men, Sergeant Connac and his squad, and Owen found the dead. They placed them in double lines on one side of the ruined gate. Kel tried not to watch. Some of the dead were in pieces when the grimfaced soldiers laid them out. She would have to look at them soon, but not now, surely, when some had to be reassembled like puzzle toys. Despite the men’s care, a head or foot sometimes thumped the ground as those lowering a corpse slipped. Coming out from behind the looted storage sheds, Kel noticed that someone had found the head of the carpenter Snalren and was placing it in its proper position atop his neck. Snalren had once told Kel that Dom had informed him she was a disaster as a carpenter, so she must not work those chores. Kel shuddered. Was this how she would always remember him, as a corpse in
pieces?

  Wyldon came up beside Kel and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You couldn’t have known that this was coming, Mindelan. It’s not your fault.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kel replied softly. She wasn’t going to point out that in her shoes, he would feel it was his fault. He’d know that already.

  Sparrows darted over the wall, cheeping urgently. They swirled around Kel. Wyldon frowned. “Mindelan, what is the problem with those birds?” he demanded.

  Kel looked at the sparrows. Since Daine’s work with them, her original flock had doubled. The new additions were far more upset over their news than the veterans, Nari, Arrow, Quicksilver, and the rest. The newer birds swooped and fluttered, chattering in panic.

  “Nari, calm them down,” Kel ordered. “I can’t think with all this noise.”

  The queen of the sparrow flock peeped once loudly. The frightened birds landed on the backs and heads of the camp dogs who had returned to Haven or on the shoulders of the nearest men. Wyldon’s captain jumped as five selected him as a perch, two on each shoulder, one clinging to his beard.

  “Nari, Arrow, report,” Kel told the sparrows who had settled on Wyldon. The two immediately took to the air and flew in a small, tight circle, the sign for “friend.” Then both dropped to the ground and hopped around, one wing dragging. “Hurt friend,” Kel interpreted. Nari and Arrow rose in the air and came together in mock battle, tiny claws extended. Arrow fled while Nari fluttered, dipped, and swerved around Kel. “Some of our people are alive, but hurt,” Kel told Wyldon. “They’re due south of us. The birds will lead.”

  “Captain Tollet, take five squads,” ordered Wyldon. “Proceed with caution. I believe whatever took place here, we missed it, but there’s no point in carelessness.”

  “Very good, milord,” the captain replied. He glanced at his shoulders. “Uh . . .”

  Kel raised her hands. The birds who had chosen the captain for a perch took off. Tollet saluted Wyldon properly, then turned and bellowed five sergeants’ names.

  Kel walked down the rows of the dead. Here was Uttana, she who had spun the finest thread in camp. If Kel kept her eyes on Corporal Grembalt’s face rather than the ruined flesh below his belt, he appeared to be sleeping. A redheaded toddler had been struck by a crossbow bolt. Ilbart, he won all the horse races against his fellow soldiers. Oswel, he brewed illegal mead and started fights when drunk. Waehild, a hedgewitch who told off-color jokes to see if Kel would blush. Sergeant Kortus, slashed crosswise from collarbone to hip. Aufrec, another sergeant. Neum, he won any wrestling match, whether against fellow soldiers or against civilians who fancied that all that marching meant soldiers had weak arms.

  Uniforms. Most of the dead wore uniforms. Kel frowned and went back along the lines. Sixty-three dead, over thirty-five of them in army maroon. Sergeants, corporals, privates. Soldiers. Some part of her mind stirred under the weight of her shock. Here was Oluf, who had commanded a squad of eight convicts and two corporals. She looked and spotted his corporals: one had been shot; one was missing his right arm and leg. Here was Vidur, whose men were also convicts.

  Where was Sergeant Yngvar? His corporals were here, but not Yngvar.

  Kel walked the lines of the dead again. Only sixty-three, sixty-four including Zamiel. No one had found more bodies in the wreckage for some time. She stopped and rubbed her temples, calling the duty roster up before her mind’s eye. Merric had meant to patrol with a convict squad today, Vidur’s squad. Yet Vidur was here—not his corporals, nor his convicts. Yngvar was not here, but his corporals were.

  She looked around and found Connac at her elbow. The man was a twenty-year veteran in the royal army. She knew he’d seen all kinds of dreadful things, but this had left him gray-faced, a white line around his tightly shut lips.

  “Where are the wounded?” she asked, gripping his arm. “Were they in the infirmary when it burned?”

  The man shook his head. “No wounded, Lady Kel,” Connac replied numbly. “Not a one. We looked. Under the barracks, in the cisterns, the garrets. No one at all, and the infirmary was empty.”

  No wounded in a camp of nearly five hundred people? Only sixty-four dead, most of them soldiers?

  “Have you seen our convicts?” she asked, her dazed mind struggling to think clearly.

  The sergeant shook his head.

  Kel looked around, seeing the camp afresh. Her thinking was sluggish. Clearing her mind was like fighting her way to air from underwater. Doors and shutters were ripped from buildings, as if the enemy had been hungry children scrambling to crack a nut for the treasure inside. Animals . . .

  “Horses?” she demanded.

  Again Connac shook his head.

  Where were the survivors? Where were the dead? They hadn’t located even a fifth of Haven’s population. More people had to be alive somewhere. Perhaps the men hadn’t looked hard enough. There would be survivors hidden away.

  Kel went to the back wall of the camp and began another search. This time she went through every nook, cranny, and cubbyhole. She knew them all. She even checked the secret exit, emerging between the boulders below Haven’s western wall. From a nearby stand of trees some cows gazed at her.

  They took the horses and left the cows, she told herself. Hearing a squeal from near the river, she added, And the pigs. Meat animals. They left good meat animals behind but not a single living human.

  She cut a willow switch with her belt knife and drove the cows toward the gate. Standing below it, she yelled up for men to take charge of them and to round up the pigs.

  As five men raced down the slope over the boulders, Wyldon came to the gate. “We’ve got Merric!”

  June 4–7, 460

  Haven and Fort Masti f

  twelve

  RENEGADE

  Kel abandoned the cows and ran up the slope, clambering over boulders. At the top she paused to catch her breath. There had been new arrivals while she had searched for one more survivor. Their horses were troopers’ horses with military saddles and sweat-dark coats, some with long, blood-caked scratches on their hides. Inside the chipped walls she found convicts at last, six of them, the silvery mark blazing through blood and grime on their foreheads. All showed signs of a hard fight. Some wore crude bandages; one corporal sat on the gatehouse bench, his left leg straight out in front of him in a crude tree-limb splint.

  Kel ran for headquarters. In the clerks’ office Sergeant Yngvar lay on a long worktable. One of Vidur’s corporals, a sallow, black-whiskered man who had a nasty way with a riding crop, occupied a cot someone had found. Yngvar sported a large black knot on his forehead. He grinned at Kel, revealing broken-off teeth between swollen lips. He pointed to the lump on his skull and said with pride, “Ma always said I had the hardest head south o’ the Vassa.”

  Kel rested a hand on Yngvar’s shoulder. “Your mother was wise, and you are fortunate,” she informed him. “And so are we, to get you back only a little dented.”

  Yngvar nodded, grim. “Thanks to Sir Merric, milady.”

  “Where?” Kel asked.

  “Your room,” said Wyldon.

  Kel found Neal beside her cot. He occupied a stool and was holding Merric’s hand as the emerald fire of his magic rolled over his friend. Merric was ghost-white with blood loss. Kel watched, hands clenched, as Neal’s green fire pooled in an ugly stab wound on Merric’s right side and on a long slash down his left thigh.

  Merric saw Kel and smiled thinly. “Thirty of them. They caught us at the southern part of the sweep. Not that we chased thirty, mind. The sparrows fetched us. I should have waited for their count, they’ve gotten so good at counting, but we saw only seven, so we followed. I swear the sparrows called us ten kinds of idiot when we did it. Stupid thing . . .”

  “How were you to know more would be waiting?” Kel demanded softly, crouching on Merric’s free side.

  “You would have been suspicious,” Merric said. “You’d’ve waited for the sparrows.”

  “Neither of us can know that,”
Kel told her friend. “I might have done the same thing. So stop torturing yourself. What next?”

  Merric grimaced. “We heard the horn calls from the fort just when they ambushed us. We tried to get past, go back to Haven, but there were too many. They drove us south, but then they broke off. I think they heard one of their own horn calls. They weren’t really interested in a fight, Kel. Just in getting us away from Haven. As it was, we lost two men— Leithan and, and Qafi, that Bazhir convict. Fought like a wolf, he did. Kept me from being cut in two.” He was sweating. “Kel, I’m sorry. We should have been more careful. How many dead?” His hands clenched the sheets. “How many?”

  “We don’t know,” Kel replied honestly. Leithan had been a street robber, Qafi a horse thief, both hard fighters. They had done good work for Haven in other attacks. “We’re still looking.”

  Neal raised his head. “Look, if you can’t hush—”

  “Save your strength, Queenscove,” Wyldon ordered from the door. “Get him so he can be moved without hurt, but we’ve other wounded. Mastiff’s healers can finish up once we get there.”

  Neal looked up, green eyes blazing, and opened his mouth to argue. Kel scowled at him. Neal closed his lips without a sound.

  “My lord, I’d like to search the area for survivors,” Kel said. “I’m hoping they used the tunnel to get out.”

  Wyldon looked at her. She saw he thought it was unlikely, but he kept that to himself. “Take three squads. Be wary, Mindelan.”

  “Merric’s fine for now,” Neal said, the green fire of his Gift fading. “He can be moved safely.”

  “Too contrary to get yourself properly killed,” said Kel to her redheaded friend.

  Merric smiled. His eyelids drooped; he’d be asleep in a moment. “Sorry I let you down,” he whispered. His eyes closed.