Harald Redmede was captain of the royal foresters, the hardest man in the woods, some said. “You only die once,” he said, and spat. It wasn’t contempt; his mouth was full of wood ash.
“And then we try and hold Lissen Carak,” Gavin said, thinking it over. “Sweet Christ. With the twelve thousand we have left? Mayhap?”
“Yer brother held it wi’ five hunerd,” Redmede the elder said.
“The king came and rescued us,” Gavin said.
Tamsin nodded. “We will have to pray for Harmodius and Desiderata this time.” She paused, opened her mouth to speak, and then said nothing. She looked at Tapio.
Gavin looked back to the east. “The Prince of Occitan and the Count of the Borders are raising the royal army in the east,” he said. “We are not alone.”
“You are asssking me to give all I have,” Tapio said. “To sssave the world of men.”
Gavin drew himself up. He was still the Green Earl; he was far from beaten. “I have lost Ticondonaga,” he said. “When we are victorious, I will rebuild it. I pledge the Kingdom of Alba to rebuilding N’gara.”
Tapio nodded slowly. Then he raised his arms as if invoking the aid of heaven.
“It isss done,” he said.
Tamsin vanished.
“Tamsssin hasss taken our people and run,” Tapio said. “Now let usss take the time we have won, and not sssquander it.”
Gavin nodded. “Break and run,” he said.
Weary men and women clambered to their feet, and hauled their mates up; men donned packs. Bess was with the matrons; Bill Redmede missed her, but he got his pack on his shoulder. Bill wondered if it was symbolic that the Jack’s white wool cotes had grown to a colour more like summer green, and the crisp dark green cotes of the royal foresters had bleached in the sun to a colour lighter than the leaves of a summer oak, so that the two were nearly indistinguishable in the shade of the old beech trees.
“I’m tired of getting beat,” Redmede said to his brother. He was too loud; no one could hear well, and the dark sky frightened everyone.
Ser Gavin heard him, and he looked down and his smile was tired and grim. “Fight, get beat, rise up, and fight again,” he said. “That’s our job.”
Some men laughed, and some muttered darkly, but authority called; sergeants and vintners ordered men into lines or columns, and despite everything, a rear guard of Jacks and foresters and Irkish knights was formed and, as if daring fate, went back up the ridge above them.
Gavin found his heart rising. “Damn,” he said. “Damn me. We aren’t beat yet.”
Tapio nodded. “Indeed,” he said. “We mortals are not ssshort of courage. Perhapss it isss becaussse we die so fassst anyway.”
Behind a screen of rangers, the Army of the Alliance of Men and the Wild formed into columns and tramped off into the last light along the very same trail that Bill Redmede’s shattered Jacks had traversed in the other direction just a year before.
Grey Cat, the wiliest of his hunters, grinned. “Just eight days to the Cohocton Country,” he said.
Redmede took a long pull at his nearly empty canteen and spat. “I’m too fuckin’ old for this,” he said.
Gavin had a notion, as a squire brought him a horse, and he played with his stirrup leathers while he refined it.
“Where is Lady Tamsin?” he asked Tapio.
“Clossse,” Tapio replied. “She isss doing what can be done for N’gara.”
“I need her,” Gavin said.
Almost instantly, the Lady of Faeries appeared.
“If we could hide,” Gavin said to the Lady of Illusions, “we might avoid some fights we would surely lose.”
She nodded. “This is both subtle and good,” she said. “And we can use this ugly darkness against our enemy.”
Then Tamsin and Tapio stood together for so long that the last tail of the army passed them, marching east into the twilight, lit by mage lights and will-o’-wisps. They stood like statues, and then, together, they faded into a more-than-twilight obscurity and were gone, not suddenly but very slowly, like the colour bleaching from wool in a tub of laundry.
When Syr Ydrik and his hunters rode by on their tall war elk, they saw nothing of the magister or the irk queen, and a dozen veteran rangers passed east and could find no trace of the army they had so lately left.
Gavin kept the column moving all through the night, through exhaustion and near mutiny, to fresh water and another strong camp. He dismounted, took a message from the latest imperial messenger bird, wrote out a long response about the battle just fought, and directed the Abbess Miriam to take command of the peasants of the North Albin and begin digging trenches. And as he rode east, he looked at the stars, and wondered if the same stars were rising over his brother and the company.
He scratched the scales that now covered most of the left side of his body, and wished the Red Knight would appear. Or send a messenger bird, or something.
“Where the hell are you?” he asked the eldritch sky.
Part I
Maneuvers and Evasions
Chapter One
Harndon—Queen Desiderata of Alba
The same sky, still unstained by the line of new volcanoes belching ash in the north, hung over Harndon. The queen had come home to her capital, flushed with victory and new motherhood, cradling her son, Constantine, in her arms, to the thin cheers of her hungry and plague-infected people.
Harndon looked like a woman beaten by a drunken spouse; signs hung awry, there were burns and smoke damage everywhere, and no one smiled, or sang. The city seemed empty of children, and too quiet. The center of the city, the “palace” as it was known, rich stone houses packed close in around the Episcopal Palace, was a gutted ruin. A spring and summer of civil unrest and war had decimated the city’s nobles and left its mark on merchant and guildsmen alike.
And where the Knights of Saint Thomas had reopened their hospital, there was a line of anxious women, all with silent children. The only sound was coughing. There was a fashion growing for women to carry black linen handkerchiefs, to hide signs of the plague; men and women were wearing hoods, and some wore linen over their faces, too.
Grand Prior John Wishart left the queen to a palace full of spiders and roaches and mice. The former Archbishop of Lorica had hated cats, and ordered them exterminated, so there were suddenly rats in the grain supply. And the first detachment of nuns and brother knights looked exhausted; they had dark circles under their eyes and many were utterly drained of potentia. Prior Wishart dismounted with sixty Knights of the Order at his back and another fifteen nuns from the northern priories, and before the evening bells rang for vespers, they were grinding Umroth bone to powder and working ops in the infirmary.
Harmodius, the greatest magus in the kingdom, was with them. He had spent his power like a wastrel son on the ride south from the Inn of Dorling, working cures every day, casting wide into the countryside and returning empty in the evening from visiting plague-stricken hamlets and solitary farms, sometimes alone, sometimes with a priest and a pair of nuns with powers of their own, or merely with the human power of their devotion.
Ser Gerald Random, the kingdom’s richest merchant and the acting Chancellor of the Kingdom and Mayor of Harndon, had seized every ounce of Umroth ivory in the city, and sent it to a pair of veteran practitioners—just emerged from the archbishop’s prison cells—to be tested. As soon as the ivory was judged and valued, it was ground to powder by apothecaries and sent to the grand priory in the ancient temple. There, workmen struggled through the night to fit panes of horn to mend the great windows smashed by Gallish brigands and the Harndon mob, too; the sound of breaking glass had proven equally beautiful to both sides. Even as they blocked the draughts, novices and squires mixed philtres while the mages and the brother knights with power to heal worked on the growing crowds of plague victims; and too many people who were merely afraid.
And there, while attending to a woman so afflicted that her life hung by a golden thread, Prior
Wishart heard the news from one of the Order’s initiate squires; Eufemmie Muiscant had just come from the castle with more Umroth ivory, and she had seen the imperial messenger bird and heard the queen’s comments.
Wishart tried to keep his focus as he wrestled with the notion that the nun with whom he’d debated the perils of love just months before had had a public apotheosis in the midst of her convent.
The Prior of Harndon, second officer of the Order in Alba, Ser Balin Broadarrow, looked up from his own patient in the next bed when young Eufemmie was done telling her news.
“Squire, be so good as to fetch clean linens for this bed,” Ser Balin asked courteously. As soon as the young woman was gone, he shook his head at Ser John. “Sister Amicia is a saint? In my lifetime?” The Prior of Harndon was a round-faced, portly man; a life of arms and abstention did not seem to affect either his girth or his good cheer. “God works in mysterious ways.”
Wishart bore down, concentrating on his working; cleaning the afflicted woman’s blood in a laborious sweep that was far more like the drudgery of a long patrol in the Wild than like a reckless cavalry charge of power. The cure took time, power, concentration, and patience, and any missed animiculae resulted in the caster having to work the patient all over again; it had happened too often, and every failure wasted the precious resources of ops and ivory.
But there was a specific feeling in the patient and in the aethereal when the corpus was clear of infection, and Wishart could feel the denouement coming. He honed his concentration the way he would have done in prayer, walling off thoughts of Amicia’s elevation, of her powers and their loss. His thought became a torch, burning away the poison in the woman’s blood, and then the moment of triumph was reached, and she sighed, and he sat back, his attention relaxing gradually until he could release his focus. Almost no time had passed in the real; he glanced at Ser Balin and replayed the brother knight’s words inside his head.
He smiled. “I’m really not surprised,” he said.
Balin put a hand on his own patient, testing her for a recurring fever. “But … in our lifetimes! Someone we know!” He laughed aloud. “What a wonderful thing!” He winked at his commander. “Perhaps I’ll address a prayer to her now.”
“Balin,” Wishart said.
“Is it true?” asked Sister Mary. She burst in, arms full of creamy white linen sheets, and she didn’t even curtsy.
But Balin grinned. Sister Mary was one of his favourites; she had been with Amicia until Easter, and was developing into a fine young doctor. And had just tested for enough latent power to be trained further. “Yes,” he said without preamble.
Wishart shook his head. “Friends,” he began, and then he heard the cheering.
He had been about to caution them to keep the news to themselves, but throughout the priory, men and women were cheering.
Sister Mary dropped down on her knees and began to pray.
Harndon—Master Pye
Master Pye had returned immediately with his apprentices; the smoke of their forges had appeared within days of the fight at Gilson’s Hole, and now they were casting metal. He felt the lack of Duke and Edmund, away with the emperor and the army, but he had absorbed all the staff of six master bell-casters and they were fine young men and women, and with a dozen of his older younglings, he was hard at work. He had Master Landry, the best bell-maker in all Alba, at his side, to supervise the casting.
In the next yard, sixty out-of-work millers learned how to use spoke shaves while a dozen carpenters under a journeyman knocked up shave-benches from planks and firewood.
“Ye want six hundred wheels?” the wheelwright master, Master Pearl, complained. “Blessed Saint Thomas! Is this on top o’ yesterday’s order?”
Mistress Anne Bateman, now Lady Anne, and Becca Almspend, soon to be Lady Lachlan, stood in the muddy yard, their overgowns filthy to the ankle, each carrying wax tablets covered in dense columns of markings. “Yes, master,” Lady Anne said. “Six hundred more wheels.”
“I dinna ha’e the wood,” he protested.
“Buy it,” Almspend snapped. “We are paying.”
“Blessed Trinity. Lady, there’s no more good board lumber to be had …” He shook his head.
“If I find you the lumber …?” Lady Anne said.
“Then I need some loons to work it!” the northerner shouted. “By the cross o’ Christ, madam!”
“Find them,” Almspend said. “Stop all work on any other project.”
“I ha’e that already!” he protested.
“In the city. The queen orders it. No wheel is to be built for any reason, nay, not even for the queen’s carriage or a baby’s pram, until these wheels are completed and these wagons built.”
The wheelwright looked at them for a moment. Then he crossed his arms.
“Fine,” he spat.
“Master.” Lady Anne put a hand on his arm. “We are in a fight to the finish, and just now, that fight is as likely to be won by wheelwrights as by swordsmen and magisters.”
He thought about that a moment, and a smile lit his face. “Well, that’s bra’ly put,” he admitted. “I’ll do wha’ I can.” He paused. “Jesus.” He bowed his head at the name, piety, and blasphemy mixed in a single gesture. “Wha’ in the de’il’s name is Pye doin’? Consortin’ wi’ daemons? That’s the stink o’ hell!”
Indeed, the sulphur reek rolled across the wheelwright’s yard like a cloud of poison.
“He’s making the cargo,” Almspend said. “You make the wheels. Oh, and all of your apprentices are seconded to the royal army. As of now.”
“By all that’s holy!” the master complained. “But …”
“War,” said Lady Anne. “Send your people in groups of ten to the Order of Saint Thomas for inoculation against the plague.” She handed him a pass bearing the royal seal.
“What’s next?” she asked Becca Almspend.
“Paper-makers,” Becca responded, looking at her tablet. “Master Elena Diodora. Or should I say, Mistress.”
The two left the yard and trudged north along the street.
Harndon—Lessa
Lessa moved quickly through the darkening streets. Above her head, a great, dark column like distant smoke climbed out of the north and west, a reaching hand of darkness that scared her more than the scarred killer she’d chosen to follow. She had her reasons, just as no doubt he had his own.
She was dressed like a beggar or a prostitute, in ragged wool kirtle several sizes too large and a shapeless overdress whose lower hem was almost black with old mud. She was barefoot, and the filthy streets oozed a cold mud that stank like nothing she’d ever encountered before she’d undertaken this adventure.
She didn’t like the looming darkness in the north, and she didn’t like that men watched her as if she was prey. She was careful, moving from cover to cover, aware that Tyler should have sent Tom or Sam on this mission except that they were both as stupid as the oxen they’d followed all their lives.
Yet for all her care, she didn’t see the man until he stepped out from a narrow alley. His open palm slammed into her shoulder and with the same arm he spilled her into the muddy street.
He put a booted foot on her stomach. “Whose little whore are you?” he asked. “Mine now, sweetie. Someone’s a fool for letting you walk alone where big bad men like me can find you.”
He was tall, strongly built, with a handsome face and a sword at his hip and fine gold earrings. He might have been a courtier in foppish Galle clothes, but everything about him shouted pimp. The clothes were too tight, the shoes too worn.
He leaned down. “Oh, sweeting, fear not. We will be such friends.” His smile was as false as the jewel in his dagger hilt.
Lessa glanced at the mouth of the alley to make sure he didn’t have a bravo at his back and then plunged a little dagger into the back of his calf. He shrieked and fell; she rolled over, fouling her whole gown, and ran.
Her limbs felt weak and she hated her weakness; her hands tre
mbled even as she ran, and she had to lean against a building and master herself, so great was her fear and revulsion. But there was no pursuit and in a minute she had her head together. Then she went more carefully, passing along the north of Cheapside and glancing briefly at the crowds outside the grand priory. The word was that the knights were curing the plague. Tyler said the knights were their enemies as much as the king and queen, and Lessa wasn’t sure she agreed.
But she passed them, passed the ruins of the Episcopal Palace, and went up the hill past the burned stone shells of a dozen rich houses that now protruded like rotten, crumbling teeth in a fresh corpse’s mouth. She climbed the mound that led to the oldest part of the castle, almost directly above the temple, and there were a dozen inns nestled under, and in some cases, resting against the walls of the great fortress; the Inns of Court, where young men and a few women went to learn the law and the ways of courts, the rules of courtesy and knighthood and government, at least in better times. Since the troubles and the plague, the inns were all but deserted, which Lessa knew was bad for her little mission. She looked terribly out of place in her stinking muddy overgown.
But her bad fortune was balanced by good; the old soldier at the door of the Queen’s Arms Tavern knew that he had an empty tap room behind him and he wasn’t going to turn away a customer, even if it was some drabble tail puke from Cheapside. He reached out to give her a casual squeeze and only withheld his hand at the smell of her muddy gown.
Lessa promised herself that when the Day came, he’d be dead. Then she slipped past him into the common room, where fewer than a dozen men sat at the ancient tables, drinking the inn’s excellent beer.
And her good fortune continued, for there, at the farthest table, was a man in a green hat with a yellow feather. She swayed her hips and arched her back and moved across to him with a confidence that she didn’t feel; that she almost never felt, in fact, except when she had a bow in her hand.
He was older than she had expected; forty or fifty, with grey in his beard and hair. He looked as hard as iron; as hard as Tyler. For all that, his nails were clean and his sword was good.