“No.” A stirring of surprise went through the watchers at Josua’s words. “You do not surrender to me.”
Varellan looked up, puzzled and sullen. “My lord?”
“You have not surrendered your Nabbanai soldiers to a foreign army. You have been defeated by the rightful heir of your household. Despite your brother’s patricide—I know you do not believe me yet, Varellan—the Benidrivine House still will rule, even when Benigaris is in shackles.” Josua stepped back. “It is to Camaris-sá-Vinitta you surrender, not to me.”
Camaris seemed more surprised than Varellan. The old knight turned questioningly to Josua; then, after a moment’s hesitation, he extended a long arm and gently took the baton from the young man’s hand.
“Rise, nephew,” he said. “You have brought only honor on our House.”
Varellan’s face was a confusion of emotions. “How can that be?” he demanded. “Either you and Josua are lying and I have lost our most important pass to a usurper, or I have sent hundreds of brave soldiers to die in the cause of the man who murdered my father!”
Camaris shook his head. “If your error was innocent, then there is no blame.” He spoke with a curious heaviness, and his gaze seemed fixed on something other than the suffering young man before him. “It is when evil is done by choice, however small or foolish the undertaking may seem, that God mourns.” He looked to Josua, who nodded. The old knight then turned to face the watching soldiers and prisoners. “I declare that all who will fight with us to free Nabban shall themselves be free men,” Camaris cried, loud enough that even the most distant parts of the gathering could hear him. He raised the baton, and for a moment the battle-light seemed to be on him again. “The Kingfisher House will restore its honor.”
There was a loud shout from the men. Even Varellan’s defeated army seemed surprised and heartened by what they had seen.
Tiamak took the onset of more general celebration to elbow his way through the crowd of soldiers and sidle up to Josua; the prince was having a few quiet words with Varellan, who was still angry and bewildered.
“Your Majesty?” The Wrannaman stood by the prince’s elbow, uncomfortably conscious of his small stature in the midst of all these armored giants. How could little Binabik and his troll-kin—none of them much more than two-thirds Tiamak’s size—stand it?
Josua turned to see who had spoken. “A moment, please, Tiamak. Varellan, this goes far deeper than even what your brother did at Bullback Hill. There are things that you must hear that will seem strange beyond belief—but I am here to tell you that in these days, the impossible has become the actual.”
Tiamak did not want to stand waiting for Josua to tell the whole story of the Storm King’s war. “Please, your Majesty. I have been sent to tell you that your wife, Lady Vorzheva, is giving birth.”
“What?!” Josua’s attention was now complete. “Is she well? Is anything amiss?”
“I cannot say. Duchess Gutrun sent me as soon as the time came. I rode all the way from the monastery. I am not used to riding.” Tiamak resisted the temptation to rub his aching rump, deciding that as casual as his relations with nobility had become, there were perhaps some boundaries still. But he did ache. There was something foolishly dangerous about riding around on an animal so much bigger than he was. It was a drylander custom he did not see himself adopting.
The prince looked helplessly at Varellan, then at Camaris. The old knight’s lips creased in a ghostly smile, but even this seemed to have pain in it. “Go, Josua,” he said. “There is much I can tell Varellan without you.” For a moment he paused and his face seemed to crumple; tears welled in his eyes. “May God give your wife a safe birthing.”
“Thank you, Camaris.” Josua seemed too distracted to take much note of the old man’s reaction. He turned. “Tiamak. I apologize for my bad manners. Will you ride back with me?”
The Wrannaman shook his head. “No, thank you, Prince Josua. I have other things I need to do.”
And one of them is recover from the ride here, he added silently.
The prince nodded and hurried away.
“Come,” Camaris was saying as he laid his long arm across Varellan’s shoulder. “We need to talk.”
“I’m not sure that I wish to hear what you will tell me,” the young man replied. He seemed only half-joking.
“I am not the only one who should speak, nephew,” the old knight said. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “There is much I would hear from you of my home and of my family. Come.”
He led Varellan off toward the row of tents pitched along the ridge-line. Tiamak watched them go with a faint sense of disappointment.
There it is. I may be in the thick of things, but I am still an outsider. At least if this were written in a book, I would know what they will say to each other. There is indeed something to be said for a lonely banyan tree.
After a few moments watching the retreating figures, Tiamak shivered and wrapped his cloak closer about himself. The weather had turned cold again; the wind seemed to have knives in it. He decided it was time to go in search of a little wine to relieve the aching of his back and fundament.
The mist that surrounded Naglimund was poisonously chill. Eolair would have given much to be in front of the fire in his great hall at Nad Mullach, with war a distant memory. But war was here, waiting just a short distance up the slope.
“Stand fast,” he told the Hernystiri who huddled behind him. “We will move soon. Remember—they all bleed. They all die.”
“But we die faster,” one of the men said quietly.
Eolair did not have the heart to rebuke him. “It is the waiting,” he murmured to Isorn. The duke’s son turned a pale face toward him. “These are brave men. It is the waiting and the not-knowing that undoes them.”
“It is not just that.” Isorn gestured with his chin toward the fortress, a craggy shadow in the mists. “It is this place. It is the things we fight.”
Eolair ground his teeth together. “What is keeping the Sithi? It might be different if we could understand what our allies are doing. I swear, it seems they are waiting for the wind to change or some particular birds to fly overhead. It is like fighting beside an army of scryers.”
Isorn, despite his own tension, turned a look of pity on the count. Eolair felt it almost as a rebuke. “They know best how to battle their kinfolk.”
“I know, I know.” Eolair slapped at his sword-hilt. “But I would give much …”
A high-pitched note sang along the hillside. Two more horns joined in.
“Finally!” the Count of Nad Mullach breathed. He turned in the saddle. “We follow the Sithi,” he called to his men. “Stay together. Protect each other’s backs, and do not lose yourselves in this gods-cursed murk.”
If Eolair expected to hear an answering shout from the men, he was disappointed. Still, they followed him as he spurred up the slope. He looked back and saw them wading through the snow, grim and silent as prisoners, and he wished again he had brought them to some better fate.
What should I expect? We are fighting an unnatural enemy, our allies are no less strange, and now the battle is not even on our own soil. It is hard for the men to see this is for the good of Hernystir, let alone for the good of their villages and families. It is hard for me to see that, though I believe it.
The mists swirled about them as they drove toward Naglimund’s shadowy wall. Beyond the gap he could see only the faintest signs of moving shapes, although a trick of hearing made the shrill cries of the Norns and the birdlike war-songs of the Sithi seem to echo all around. Suddenly the great hole in the wall was before them, a mouth opening to swallow the mortals whole.
As Eolair rode through, the air was torn by a flash of light and a booming crash. For a moment all seemed to go inside out; the mist turned black, the shadowy forms before him white. His horse reared, screaming, and fought the reins. A moment later another great smear of light rubbed against his eyes, blinding him. When Eolair could see again, his terrifi
ed horse was heading back toward the breach in the wall, right into the reeling mass of the count’s own troop. Eolair yanked furiously at the reins, to no effect. With a strangled curse, he pulled himself free of the stirrups and rolled out of the saddle, then crashed to the snowy ground as his mount ran wildly, scattering the reeling soldiers before him and trampling several.
As he lay struggling to catch his breath, Eolair felt rough hands close on him and drag him to his feet. Two of his Hernystirmen were staring at him, eyes wide with fear.
“That … that light …” one of them stammered.
“My horse ran mad,” the count shouted above the din. He smacked snow loose from his leggings and surcoat and strode forward. The men fell in behind him. Isorn’s horse had not bolted; still mounted, the young Rimmersman had vanished somewhere in the mists ahead.
Naglimund’s inner court looked like some kind of nightmarish foundry. Mist hung everywhere like smoke, and flames leaped periodically from the high windows and traveled along the stone walls in great blazing curtains. The Sithi were already at close quarters with the Norn defenders; their shadows, magnified by flames and fog, stretched out across the castle like warring gods. For a moment Eolair thought he knew what Maegwin saw. He wanted to fall down on his face until it all went away.
A horseman appeared out of the fog. “They are hard pressed before the inner keep,” Isorn called. He had a bloody streak down his jaw. “That is where the giants are.”
“Oh, gods,” Eolair said miserably. He waved his men to follow, then set out at a lope after Isorn. His boots sank into the snow at each step, so that he felt as though he labored up a steep hill. Eolair knew his mail-coat was too heavy to let him run for very long. He was breathing hard already, and not one blow struck.
The battle before the inner keep was a chaos of blades and mist and near-invisible foes into which Eolair’s men quickly vanished. Isorn stopped to pick up a fallen pike and ride against a bloodied giant who held half a dozen Sithi at bay with his club. Eolair sensed movement nearby and turned find a dark-eyed Norn rushing toward him waving a gray ax. The count traded strokes with his attacker for a moment, then his foot slipped and he dropped to a knee. Before his foe could take advantage, he scooped a handful of snow and flung it up in a white shower toward the Norn’s face. Without waiting to see if it had distracted his opponent, Eolair lunged forward, sweeping his sword around at ankle-height. There was a resounding crunch of steel against bone and his enemy fell atop him.
The next moments passed in what seemed a profound stillness. The sounds of battle dropped away, as though he had passed through into some other realm—a silent world only a cubit wide and a few inches deep where nothing existed but his own panicked struggle, his failing wind, and the bony fingers clawing at his throat. The white face hovered before him, grinning mirthlessly like some Southern devil mask. The thing’s eyes were flat dark pebbles; its breath smelled like a cold hole in the ground.
Eolair had a dagger at his belt, but he did not want to let go even an instant to reach for it. Still, despite his advantage in size, he could feel his hands and arms losing their strength. The Norn was gradually crushing the muscles of Eolair’s neck, closing his windpipe. He had no choice.
He released his grip on the Norn’s wrists and snatched at his sheath. The fingers on his throat tightened and the silence began to hiss; blackness spread across the cubit-wide world. Eolair hammered with the knife at the thing’s side until the pressure slackened, then he clutched his dying enemy like a lover, trying to prevent the Norn from reaching any weapon of its own. At last the body atop him ceased struggling. He pushed and the Norn rolled off, flopping into the snow.
As Eolair lay gasping for breath, the dark-haired head of Kuroyi appeared at the edge of his cloudy vision. The Sitha seemed to be deciding whether the count would live or not; then, without saying a word, he vanished from Eolair’s view.
Eolair forced himself to sit up. His surcoat was sodden with the Norn’s fast-cooling blood. He glanced at the sprawled corpse, then turned to stare, arrested even in the midst of chaos. Something about the shape of his enemy’s face and slender torso was … wrong.
It was a woman. He had been fighting a Norn woman.
Coughing, each breath still burning in his throat, Eolair struggled to his feet. He should not feel ashamed—she had almost killed him—but he did.
What kind of world …?
As the silence in his head receded, the singing of Sithi and Cloud Children pressed in on him anew, combining with the more mundane screams of anger and shrieks of pain to fill the air with a complicated, frightening music.
Eolair was bleeding in a dozen places and his limbs felt heavy as stone. The sun, which had been shrouded all day, seemed to have gone down into the west, but it was hard for him to tell whether it was sunset or the leaping flames that stained the mists red. Most of the defenders of Naglimund’s inner keep had fallen: only a final knot of Norns and the last and largest of the giants remained, all backed into a covered passageway before the keep’s tall doors. They seemed determined to hold this ground. The muddy earth before them was piled with bodies and drenched with blood.
As the battle slackened, the count ordered his Hernystirmen back. The dozen who still stood were dull-eyed and sagging with weariness, but they demanded to see the battle through to the end; Eolair felt a fierce love for them even as he cursed their idiocy out loud. This was the Sithi’s fight now, he told them: long weapons and swift reflexes were needed, and the staggering mortals had nothing left to offer but their failing bodies and brave hearts. Eolair held to his call for retreat, sending his men toward the relative safety of Naglimund’s outwall. He was desperate to bring some of them out of this nightmare alive.
Eolair remained to hunt for Isorn, who had not answered the war horn’s summons. He stumbled along the outskirts of the struggle, ignored by the Sithi warriors trying to force the giant out of the shelter of the arched doorway, where he was inflicting terrible injuries even in his dying moments. The Sithi seemed in a desperate hurry, but Eolair could not understand why. All but a few of the defenders were dead; those who remained were protecting the doors to the inner keep, but whoever was still inside seemed content to let them die doing so rather than try to bring them inside. Eventually, the Sithi would pick them off—Jiriki’s folk had few arrows left, but several of the Norns had lost their shields, and the giant, half-concealed behind one of the arch pillars, already had a half-score of feathered shafts lodged in his shaggy hide.
Where Eolair walked, the bodies of mortals and immortals alike lay scattered as if the gods had flung them down from heaven. The count passed by many faces he recognized, some of them young Hernystirmen with whom he had sat at the campfire only the night before, some Sithi whose golden eyes stared up into nothing.
He found Isorn at last, on the far side of the keep. The young Rimmersman was lying on the ground, limbs awkwardly splayed, his helmet tumbled beside him. His horse was gone.
Brynioch of the Skies! Eolair had spent hours in the freezing wind, but when he saw his friend’s body, he went colder still. The back of Isorn’s head was soaked with blood. Oh, gods, how will I tell his father?
He hurried forward and grasped Isorn’s shoulder to turn him over. The young Rimmersman’s face was a mask of mud and fast-melting snow. As Eolair gently wiped some of it away, Isorn choked.
“You live!”
He opened his eyes. “Eolair?”
“Yes, it’s me. What happened, man? Are you badly wounded?”
Isorn took in a great rasping wheeze of breath. “Ransomer preserve me, I don’t know—it feels like my head is split open.” He lifted a shaking hand to his head, then stared at his reddened fingers. “One of the Hunën struck me. A great hairy thing.” He sagged back and closed his eyes, giving Eolair another fright before he opened them again. He looked more alert, but what he said belied it. “Where’s Maegwin?”
“Maegwin?” Eolair took the young man’s hand. “She is
in the camp. You are inside Naglimund, and you’ve been hurt. I’ll go find some folk to help me with you …”
“No,” Isorn said, impatient despite his weakness. “She was here. I was chasing her when … when the giant clubbed me. He did not strike me full.”
“Maegwin … here?” For a moment it was as though the northerner had begun speaking another tongue. “What do you mean?”
“Just as I said. I saw her walk past the outskirts of the fighting, right through the courtyard, heading around the keep. I thought I was seeing things in the mist, but I know she’s been strange. I followed, and saw her just … there …” he winced at the pain as he pointed toward the far corner of the blocky keep, “and followed. Then that thing caught me from behind. Before I knew it, I was lying here. I don’t know why it didn’t kill me.” Despite the chill, sweat beaded on his pale forehead. “Perhaps some of the Sithi came up.”
Eolair stood. “I’ll get help for you. Don’t move any more than you have to.”
Isorn tried to smile. “But I wanted to take a walk in the castle gardens tonight.”
The count draped his cloak over his friend and sprinted back toward the front of the keep, skirting the siege of the keep’s great doors. He found his Hernystirmen huddled beside a gap in the outwall like sheep terrified of thunder, and took four of the healthiest back to carry Isorn to the camp. As soon as he saw they had him safe, he returned to his search for Maegwin; it had taken all the restraint he possessed to see his friend out of harm’s way first.
It did not take him long to find her. She was curled on the ground at the back of the keep. Although he could see no marks of violence on her anywhere, her skin felt deathly cold to his touch. If she breathed, he could find no sign of it.
When his wits returned sometime later, he was carrying Maegwin’s limp body in his arms, staggering across the camp at the base of the hill below Naglimund. He could not remember how he had gotten there. Men’s faces looked up as he approached, but at that moment their expressions had no more meaning for him than the bright eyes of animals.