Tristan gripped Stephen’s arm violently as a scarlet shower of blood sprayed into the air. He struggled to his feet, coughing. “Hold the line!” he screamed at the peasants frantically rolling their burning comrades in the snow.
He turned toward the wall as shattering explosions tore through the air and into the rampart, the impact of the catapults sending shards of stone flying in all directions. His throat constricted in horror at the sight of Stephen desperately trying to extinguish the fire on a peasant woman who had stood with the defenders and was now being consumed in the pitch flames. The clothes on Stephen’s back were on fire as well.
“Stephen! Drop!”
As he lunged toward his cousin Tristan caught a glimmer of gold out of the corner of his eye. The wind screamed; with a howl a pocket of the storm broke loose, drenching him and those around him with icy rain. A blast of sleet in frozen sheets poured down from above. In a twinkling the flames all round them were snuffed, leaving behind no fire but roiling clouds of thick, oily smoke. Through his soaked hair and lashes Tristan looked behind him at the sledge arena, where Llauron stood. The Invoker was pointing the golden oak-leaf staff at Stephen; he stumbled forward slightly into Gavin and leaned on the forester’s shoulder, shaken, then lowered the staff, grasping it with both hands. The cloudburst abated as quickly as it had come.
A clarion call of retreat rang forth over Navarne’s wall; both Cymrian noblemen looked westward. The vast bulk of the crowd had been pulled within the walls of the keep, or shepherded around the rampart to the northern gate. The Master of the Wall was signaling that what people could be saved had been taken into shelter. The archers were in place.
“All right; horsemen, fall back!” Tristan called to his commander. The man raised a horn to his lips and blew the retreat. The horse soldiers of Navarne, locked in heated battle with the Sorbold cavalry, struggled to break free, leaving behind the bodies of their dead, the riderless horses, and the enemy dodging the snow wolves that tore at their mounts. As the horse soldiers galloped around the broken barricades and the common people standing in wait behind them, Stephen’s archers atop the wall let fly a windstorm of arrows into the Sorbold lines, covering their retreat.
The numbness that was giving Tristan clarity was starting to recede. “Fire!” he shouted at his broken line of crossbowmen. The soldiers loosed their bolts into the jagged lines of the Sorbold infantry, many of which whom were now writhing on the ground, battling the attacks of the wolf spectres. The wind picked up, fanning the heavy smoke and filling the air with stinging sleet that fell like needles.
“To the gate!” Stephen shouted. “Withdraw, Tristan! The archers will cover you!”
Ten score and five men now lined the top of the rampart, methodically raining arrows down at the two flanks of the Sorbold column. Tristan signaled frantically to the leaders, the calm of training beginning to give way to the horror of the reality around him.
“Fall back! Fall back! Get inside the wall!” he screamed. In the distance he could hear the sound of the catapults being reloaded.
Time became suspended; everything around him seemed to move with painful slowness. His limbs were suddenly heavy, his head thick with sound and a mad buzzing in his ears. Tristan shook his head to try to clear his mind.
All around him lay bodies of the dead and dying, soldiers, but more often mere citizens of Roland, and even of Sorbold, children and old people, men and women, moaning in agony or lying silent, their blood staining the snow a rosy pink, their flesh burned away. Tristan coughed, trying to clear the taste of pitch from his mouth, only to find that in his flight he had inhaled some poor dying bastard’s blood, and it was clotting in his throat. His stomach lurched, rushed into his mouth, and he retched, falling to his knees in the gory snow.
His head lurched as Stephen seized his arm and dragged him violently to his feet.
“Tristan, come! Come!”
Behind them a high pile of haybales ripped into flame and torched fiery orange with thin lines of black withering straw, like mountains of burning birdcages. The heat sent waves of shock through the Lord Roland, and he felt a sudden burst of energy as his cousin dragged him toward the gate in the rampart. Distantly he was aware of the rhythmic twang of bowstrings in unison; he saw Gavin dragging the exhausted Invoker inside the rampart ahead of them. The last of the conscripted peasantry, the common folk who stood to defend the wall and let the others make their escape, were hurrying inside to safety now. Tristan felt a surge of fondness as he saw them go. Good people, he thought as Stephen pulled him around the battered barricades that had only a short time ago been the comfort of a reviewing stand for the nobility. My people.
The gates loomed before his eyes, large chunks of stone in the nearby walls missing from the impact of the catapults, but still sound. Tristan closed his eyes and pulled free of Stephen’s grasp.
“Unhand me,” he said sternly. “I can make it on my own.”
Once inside the shelter of the walls Stephen waded through the crowd, shouting.
“Out of the way! Back, get back from the wall!”
He shut out the ferocious noise all around him—the moaning of the injured, the cries of joy from family members reunited, the frantic calls of parents searching for lost children, the shouted orders from the various regimental captains, the scream of wood and metal as the enormous gates were closed—and quickly scaled the rampart, pulling himself atop the wall next to a guard tower that had been shattered by a catapult blast.
Outside the wall what remained of the Sorbold column, now unfettered by Llauron’s intervention of wolves and weather, was marching, walking, limping, crawling resolutely forward, one by one, into the rain of arrows from the archers atop the wall. Stephen shuddered at the utter lifelessness of their eyes, the relentlessness of their intentions. Only a few dozen remained of the attacking force; the cavalry had been decimated by the archers, and a hundred riderless horses were milling about aimlessly on the bloody field.
The Master of the Wall made his way to Stephen’s side, and stood silently, staring, as the duke did, out onto the field beyond the wall.
After a moment Stephen found his voice; his throat was dry and tight, so it sounded young and frightened to his ears. He coughed, and spoke again.
“Command half your men to rescue what stragglers they can—lower down pikes, anything, just get the few that remain inside the wall.”
“Why aren’t they retreating?” the Master of the Wall wondered aloud. “They are marching right into the flights of arrows.”
Stephen shuddered, fighting back grisly memories. “They will continue to do so, I fear, until the last man is dead. Tell your archers to train their arrows on the catapults, and pick off as many as you can there. I will have the commander of the third regiment send a force out to capture them. In the meantime, instruct the archers to aim to injure, not to kill. We need to capture some of the Sorbolds alive and try to make some sense of this nightmare.” The Master of the Wall nodded, and disappeared from Stephen’s peripheral vision as he continued to stare out over the atrocity that only a moment ago had been the solstice festival. The bright colored banners still flapped, tattered, in the stiff, smoky breeze, the glistening maypole ribbons continued to spin merrily in the wind, black with soot.
He already knew what the Sorbolds would say.
Why?
I don’t know, m’lord. I don’t remember.
16
The library at Haguefort was enormous, with high ceilings that reflected the slightest sound. Footsteps echoed on the marble floor, swallowed intermittently by the silk rugs. A slight cough or the clearing of the throat could be heard in all corners of the vast room.
Despite those sensitive acoustics, not a sound was audible now save for the crackling of the fire and the ticking of the clock.
Cedric Canderre sat heavily on one of the leather sofas near the fireplace, staring blankly into the flames, his face decades older than it had been that morning. Beside him sat Quentin
Baldasarre, Duke of Bethe Corbair, Dunstin’s brother. His silence was very different; his eyes were gleaming with a light that barely contained its wrath, and even his silent breathing was tinged with fury. Lanacan Orlando, the benison of his province, who sat in the wing chair next to him awkwardly patting his hand in an attempt to comfort him, was growing more nervous by the moment. When Quentin finally waved him away angrily, Orlando seemed almost relieved.
Ihrman Karsrick, the Duke of Yarim, poured himself another full glass of brandy, noting that Stephen’s decanter was in sorry need of refilling. He alone among the dukes of Roland had not suffered the loss of a relative or close friend, though the head of the winning sledge team, a popular guild member in his province and his personal blacksmith, had died in the attack.
The holy men had been inept at dispensing comfort, in Karsrick’s opinion; Colin Abernathy had been unable to stop weeping for more than a few moments. Lanacan Orlando, generally considered a great healer and source of consolation, was clearly irritating his duke far more than he was helping him. Philabet Griswold, the pompous Blesser of Avonderre-Navarne, had begun pontificating about Sorbold and the need for an immediate retaliation earlier but was glared into silence by Stephen Navarne, a member of his own See. Stephen was currently elsewhere looking in on his children and the makeshift hospital wards that had been set up within his holdings to tend to the wounded. Nielash Mousa, the Blesser of Sorbold, was sitting isolated in a corner, his dark skin pale and clammy. Only Ian Steward seemed calm.
The door of the library opened and Tristan Steward entered, closing it quietly behind him. He had excused himself to look in on Madeleine and the wounded from his province, and had been meeting in the courtyard below with the captains of his regiments. His face was a mask of calm as he entered the room, but Karsrick could tell from the look in his eye that he was planning something, biding his time to reveal it.
Martin Ivenstrand, the Duke of Avonderre, stood up as Tristan passed.
“The casualties, Tristan—how bad?”
“Over four hundred dead, twice that many more injured,” Tristan said, coming to a stop before the wooden stand that contained Stephen’s prized atlas from Serendair. The ancient manuscript was covered with a glass dome in order to protect the fragile pages of the charts that depicted the long-dead island from the ravages of time. Ironic, Tristan thought absently. A carefully preserved map of a world that died a thousand years ago. Directions to nowhere.
“Sweet All-God,” murmured Nielash Mousa, the Blesser of Sorbold.
“Is that a benediction, or a plea for forgiveness?” snapped Philabet Griswold, the Blesser of Avonderre-Navarne.
Karsrick’s eyes, along with all the others in the room, riveted onto the two holy men, bitter enemies and hostile contenders behind the scenes for the sole right to wear the Patriarch’s Ring of Wisdom, white robes, and star-shaped talisman. With word coming out of Sepulvarta that the Patriarch was in his last days, the feud between the two men had heated to boiling. Throughout the festival they had gibed and sniped at each other, preening and positioning themselves with various nobles, speaking in furtive discussions, meeting secretly.
All the posturing was certainly a waste of time as far as Karsrick understood. The Patriarch could name his own successor, and pass his ring on to the benison of his choice, though the declaration did not seem to be forthcoming. If he did not do so, the great scales of Jierna Tal, the Place of Weight, would decide, with the ancient Ring of Wisdom balancing on one of the plates and the man it was judging on the other. Either way, the efforts of the two holy men to consolidate power seemed futile.
At the festival Griswold had appeared to have the upper hand. He was by far the most powerful benison in Roland, a fact that was magnified because the carnival taking place was within his See. Insiders at the Patriarch’s manse, however, whispered rumors that Mousa, the only non-Cymrian benison, and the Blesser of an entire country, was the Patriarch’s favored choice. In addition, if the decision of ascendancy were to go to the scales, it would certainly not weigh against Mousa that Jierna Tal was in Sorbold.
Whatever favor Mousa might have held before the festival, and whatever pleasure he might have drawn from those rumors, was gone now. While no one had broken the silence in the library in deference to the grief of Cedric Canderre and Quentin Baldasarre, it was clear by the almost-visible frost in the air where the clergy and nobility of Roland placed the blame for the attack. The Blesser of Sorbold, a normally unflappable man with dusky skin and a bland expression, had gone gray in the face. That face was puckered in worried lines and dotted with anxious perspiration.
He rose slowly now from his seat as Griswold approached.
“This—this was an inexplicable act,” he said, resting his hand on the table beside him for balance. “Sorbold—the Crown, that is—knows nothing of this, I’m certain.” He anxiously fingered the holy amulet around his neck, its talisman shaped like the earth.
Griswold crossed his arms over his chest, causing the amulet he wore, with its talisman shaped like a drop of water, to clink soundly. “It would certainly seem that an action involving an entire column of royal soldiers might have at least a suggestion of permission from the prince or the empress,” he said haughtily. “Particularly one that violates peace treaties and commits atrocities upon the citizens of a neighboring land—a formerly allied nation.” He came to a halt in front of his nemesis as the Blesser of Sorbold drew himself up to his full height and turned to face the others.
“I can assure you that this heinous attack was not sanctioned by the government of Sorbold,” Mousa said, his voice betraying none of the anxiety apparent in his features. “Let me state emphatically that Sorbold wishes no hostility with Roland, nor with any of its other neighbors. And even if it did, the Crown Prince has been keeping vigil at the sickbed of his mother, Her Serenity, the Dowager Empress, and would certainly not have chosen this time to attack.”
“How can you say that for certain?” sneered Griswold.
“I am here, for the love of the All-God!” Mousa growled. “Do you think they would risk the life of their only benison this way?”
“Perhaps the Crown Prince is trying to tell you something,” Griswold suggested.
Mousa’s dusky face flushed with dark anger. “Void take you, Griswold! If you don’t choose to believe in my worth to my See, let me at least assure you that if Sorbold had decided to attack Roland, we would have done so with one hundred times the force you saw today! You fool! Our own people were here at the festival! You have excused away all of the assaults that have been perpetrated on citizens of Tyrian and other Orlandan provinces by your own people as ‘random’ or ‘inexplicable’—you’ve never taken responsibility for any of that violence! Yet you cannot accept that this is exactly the same?”
“It’s not the same,” said Stephen Navarne quietly. The others turned to see the master of Haguefort standing in the open doorway. He had entered so silently that none had heard him come in.
The Duke of Navarne crossed the enormous room and came to stand directly in front of Nielash Mousa, who had gone pale again at his words. Stephen brought his hand awkwardly to rest on the benison’s upper arm and found it to be trembling.
“It’s not the same, because hithertofore there have been no incursions from Sorbold—this is the first I know of. The fact that whatever madness has been causing these attacks has spread to Sorbold is most disturbing, though not altogether unexpected. Up until now it limited itself to Tyrian and Roland.”
“And Ylorc,” said Tristan Steward firmly. “I told you last summer that the Bolg had attacked my citizens, and you all chose to disregard me.”
“King Achmed denied it,” said Quentin Baldasarre.
Tristan’s eyes blazed. He reached into his boot and pulled forth a small, three-bladed throwing knife, and threw it at Baldasarre’s feet, where it clanged against the stone floor.
“He also denied selling weapons to Sorbold. See how much his word is worth.??
? The Lord Roland regarded Baldasarre coldly. “In your case, Quentin, you purchased that worthless word at the cost of your brother’s life.”
Baldasarre was off the leather couch and halfway across the room as the last words came from Tristan’s mouth, his muscles coiled in fury. Lanacan Orlando had managed to grasp the duke’s arm and was pulled along with the force of his stride, and now interposed himself between Tristan and Quentin.
“Please,” the benison whispered. “No more violence; please. Do not desecrate your brother’s memory in your anger, my son.”
“He is in the warmth of the Afterlife, having saved us all,” said Ian Steward.
“Dunstin Baldasarre died a hero’s death,” Philabet Griswold intoned.
“As did Andrew Canderre,” Ian Steward added quickly.
Cedric Canderre opened his mouth to speak, but his words were stifled by the creak of the double doors as they opened, admitting Llauron, the Invoker of the Filids. The Invoker’s chiefs had been lending aid to Stephen’s forces, Khaddyr tending to the wounded alongside the healers of Navarne, while Gavin led the reconnaissance that was assessing the Sorbold attack. Llauron nodded to Stephen, then made his way quietly to the sideboard beside Ihrman Karsrick and poured himself a last finger of brandy, emptying the decanter.
When Cedric Canderre found his voice, it was steady, belying the pain in his eyes.
“I don’t wish to debate this further,” he said flatly. “Madeleine and I need to return to my lands, to prepare for Andrew’s interment, and to comfort the Lady Jecelyn.” He cleared his throat, and cast a pointed glance at his fellow dukes, then looked to Ian Steward, the benison of Canderre-Yarim. “She is going to need much support and consolation, Your Grace. She expects Andrew’s child in autumn.”