“How many, do you think?” I ask.
“I counted one hundred and ten.”
“Where have they come from?”
“Chargate,” Hope says. “That’s the closest town to the woods. I’ll bet they’re the children from Chargate.”
“Why have they taken the kids?” Breena, a bowsmith’s daughter from near Haga, asks. “What use are they?”
“Control,” Hope says instantly. “If he’s taken the children, the people will behave themselves. What parent wouldn’t do anything to keep their child safe?”
“Gods …” I breathe. How clever. How despicable. Pay the nobles to be loyal to him, and take the children from the commoners to keep them subdued. “Do you think he’s done it everywhere, to all of the major towns?” I ask, and she nods. “Those poor people.”
“We have to do something,” Kirin says. “We have to get the kids out. There are only thirteen or so men there. Two golems. We outnumber them. We could take them.”
I turn to look at our band of refugees. Yes, technically we have the larger number. And men like Stuan, Ulrin, Hobb, and Tally are trained fighters. A lot of the women can hold their own, too. But against soldiers and golems in close quarters, and without fire to fight the golems … I see him realize this and shake the knowledge away, his need to do something greater than his need to be rational.
“We could do it,” he insists. “We’d have the element of surprise.”
“Then what?” I ask gently. “Say we do manage it, what do we do with the children?”
“Take them with us.”
“Lead a group of children across Lormere into the mountains? And when he found out, their families would be killed …”
“We have to do something.” Ema repeats Kirin’s words and turns to me. The others do the same, waiting for me to speak.
“We will. I promise. But we have to do the right something.”
I walk away from the crowd, trusting Hope to keep them quiet as they mob Kirin for more details. I wander into the trees a little way away, trying to clear my thoughts. We do need to do something; those weren’t empty words.
But what can we do that doesn’t put all of them at risk?
I imagine all those terrified parents. Imagine them all rising up in support of me. The Sleeping Prince is powerful, but if I can rally the people—the Lormerians … if they all rose up at the same time. If I can unite them …
My head starts to throb, too many thoughts fighting for space. I spot a tree stump and sit down, gently brushing away a spider that’s somehow caught on my dress. It clings to my finger, and I watch it scuttling over my hand, turning my palm over, catching it on my other hand when it threatens to go up my sleeve. Eventually, I reach out and encourage it to climb onto a nearby sapling.
And as it climbs, I stare into the distance.
We need to send a signal, something clear enough to give hope but not so incendiary as to cause Aurek to strike out at the Lormerians. Something that draws his attention from the townspeople but doesn’t direct it to us. Not completely, at least. He doesn’t need to know about us yet.
I can feel the edge of an idea, and I stand, starting to pace.
“Kirin, Nia,” I call, and the two come over. I face them, the idea taking shape and solidifying in my mind. And, much to their surprise, I grin.
“How do you feel about leaving a message in Chargate tonight?”
* * *
I send Hope on with the others, muttering darkly about foolishness.
“The only thing we can’t afford to lose is you,” she says accusingly as we part. “Are you out of your mind?”
“We have to do something.”
“It doesn’t have to be you.”
But it does. I have to lead this. I do have to put my life on the line if I’m going to stay their leader and keep them loyal to me. I have to show them I’ll fight on the front line with them. That every risk I ask them to take is one I’m willing to take, too. This is the first strike we’re going to make, after I promised them I would defeat Aurek.
I saw the horror in their eyes when Kirin told us about the children. And they looked to me to do something. They turned to me. So I have to be at the center of it, and the risk has to be a secondary concern. I have to be a leader and rise up.
I tell Hope as much and she throws her hands in the air.
“If we lose you, we lose our only chance of defeating him.”
“And if I lose them”—I point back at the trees hiding my army from my eyes—“then we’re all damned. They’ll have families affected by this. After all, they must have relatives across the land, nieces, nephews, brothers, and sisters, if not children of their own. What could they get for turning me over to Aurek? What rewards for them and their families? I have to give them a reason to not do that. I have to be bigger, and better. I have to be the only option for them.”
“You’re gambling it all on a stunt, Twylla. And you might lose.”
“I’ll definitely lose if I don’t gamble at all. And yes, it’s a stunt. At its core, it is just a bunch of kids writing on a wall. A wall his men are guarding, surrounding a town he’s imprisoned. Violated. We’re going to leave a sign that the people inside haven’t been forgotten, and not everyone has been defeated. We’re writing hope across that wall. A promise that they’re not alone. And the people outside the wall—my people—will see their leader risk her own neck to make that promise.”
Eventually, Hope backs down—reluctantly, furiously, but she does, and she and the majority of our camp set toward the mountains on the route we’ve agreed. Nia, Kirin, and Stuan—who we permit to stay once he’s proven he can perform a passable Tregellian accent—and I remain in the woods.
The plan is simple: Stuan has put on his armor, and Nia has borrowed a light mail shirt, and the two of them will cause a distraction, making sure their very Tregellian voices are heard echoing out of the woods. This will, hopefully, draw the guards away from a section of the city walls, giving Kirin and me time to daub it with our message. We debated back and forth about what to write, and where, but we’ve decided.
Tonight will be the Rising Dawn’s debut.
The choice to write our message on the outside wall is best; that way no one from within the city can be blamed, so there’s no need to punish them by hurting the city’s children. It sends the message we want, in a way that carries the lowest risk. We hope. I go over and over it in my head, trying to find a way it might backfire, but am still anxious when I can’t find one.
By pure coincidence, one of the Lormerian escapees was a leatherworker, a man called Trey, whose job it was to tan and work skin into saddles. When he fled his home, he brought some of his skins with him, in the hopes of trading them for safety, and his valuable dyes, too, and it’s the rich red madder we ask him for. We add beetroot juice from Ema’s stores, and flour, to make a thick, viscous red paint that will stain if unnoticed for long enough. We mix our paint in a Tregellian army helmet we took from Almwyk, with sticks we find on the ground, snapping evergreen branches to use as brushes.
We move to the edge of the woods, around a quarter of a mile from Chargate, and set up a kind of camp. We chew on the dried venison we’ve been left, and stir the paint, adding more beetroot juice when it begins to dry out. And then we just have to wait. We track the sun across the sky, looking at one another more frequently as it starts to lower, the air beginning to cool.
“This is madness,” Nia says, poking at the paint. “No one inside will even see it.”
“No, but the guards will see it. Someone will have to clean it off. And they’ll all talk about it. Word will spread inside the town. That’s what we want. We’re not sending a message to the outside world but to the people inside the walls, so they know they’re not alone. That someone out here is fighting. And we want Aurek to know about it, too. We want him to know that someone, somewhere, is out there.”
“If we’re caught …”
“We won’t be. It’s ea
sy. All you have to do is talk.”
“She’s good at that,” Kirin adds, and Stuan and I smile before I carry on.
“You’ll have armor, and you’ll be mostly shielded by the trees. You just need to make enough noise for them to be unsure of how many of you there are. They won’t come out of the gates without knowing that.” I look at Kirin to confirm this, and he nods. “But they will come looking over the walls, and they will call for reinforcements from nearby.”
“And that’s when Twylla and I will do our part,” Kirin says.
“Exactly. While you have distracted them at the front of the city, we will approach the south wall, paint our message, and go. We’ll meet you in the small copse two miles north of the city.”
“Are you sure you know where it is?” Nia turns to Stuan.
He sighs. “Yes. For the ninth time, I know where it is. It’s two miles north of here, and it’s a bunch of trees.”
I look up at the sky. “We should get going. We’ll see you in the copse after.”
Nia frowns. “How long should we wait at the copse?”
I look at Kirin.
“Assume if we’re not there by sunrise that we’re lost. Follow on after Hope to the mountains,” he says.
“But we will be there. And then we’ll all go on together.” I stand up and collect our makeshift paintbrushes as Kirin carefully lifts the helmet of paint. “Remember, no more than five minutes, then go. Keep moving. Change your voices. Stuan, you have to keep the accent up.”
“The Dawn Is Rising!” he says in a near-perfect Tregellian accent. Then he repeats it again in a lower voice; though some of the accent is lost, it’s still a close imitation.
“Perfect. Just keep doing that.” I look at Kirin and he nods. “Let’s go.”
I start to feel shaky as we skim down the tree line, my stomach churning with nerves. Within a few minutes we’re close enough to the walls that I can see people on the ramparts, made shadows by the torches. I count them: three, four, five figures on the north side, no golems. I can’t see the south side from here, but assume it’s manned the same way. The west side, where the main gates face out toward the woods, likely has more.
“Ready?” I ask.
Stuan nods, but Nia looks paralyzed, her face stiff, her eyes wide, and I feel sorry for her. She’s seen so much the last few days. And strangely, there’s something in her fear that makes me feel a little braver. I reach out and grip her shoulders, drawing her away from the boys.
“You don’t have to come,” I tell her quietly. “If you don’t want to. Or if you’re frightened.”
“I’m not scared,” she hisses at me.
“Then you’re a bloody idiot, because I’m terrified.”
She looks at me and takes a deep, ragged breath.
“Five minutes,” I tell her. “That’s all it will take. Just remember what I said.”
“Keep moving. Change my voice. Stay away from the walls. Run for the copse.”
“Exactly. Ready?” She nods. “Are you ready?” I ask Stuan and Kirin.
“Let’s do this,” Stuan says.
“Count to one thousand,” Kirin tells Nia.
And then we’re off, moving silently through the darkness.
As soon as we break the cover of the trees, I start to sweat, ears straining for the sound of arrows being loosed. We move across open ground, relying on the moonless night and our own stealth to cover us. It’s perhaps one thousand feet from the edge of the forest to the west wall, and every single one of those feet feels as though it takes a year to cross. We move relatively slowly; Kirin said quick movements draw the eye more than slow, so we creep, staying low to the ground, even as my body screams at me to run.
Once we reach the wall, I pause to lean against it, my whole body trembling, but Kirin grabs my wrist and shakes his head, urging me to keep moving along the west wall, desperately, terribly aware that thirty feet above, our enemy is keeping a lookout.
We finally turn on to the south wall, and I hear the murmuring of voices. One laughs, and his friend replies. Just two men, on their night shift. There’s something about the normalcy of it that makes me shiver. We keep going, walking on and on, skirting the border of the last town between us and Tregellan.
“Will this do?” Kirin says on a breath, and we both pause.
I look back, unable to make out the edge of the city wall.
Every single thing that could go wrong runs through my mind.
Stuan and Nia could get caught. What if the men from the camp come through the woods and find them?
What if one of them gets shot?
What if— But I never finish my thought, because a roar above us shatters the quiet of the night.
“The south wall! Intruders at the gates!” I hear someone call. Then the sound of footsteps on stone.
“Now,” Kirin says. He pulls out the paint and hands me the brush.
He holds it while I dip and daub the wall, reaching as high as I can, stretching my arms as wide as I can. I write The Rising Dawn in the biggest letters I can manage, Kirin moving with me as I scrawl across the wall. I can feel paint splatters on my face, and on my hands, but I don’t stop, moving quickly.
I’m finished in under a minute, and I pause.
“Let’s go,” Kirin urges.
But something is missing. “Stay there,” I hiss at him, and I dip the brush back in the helmet. I paint a line, horizontal, at least eight feet long. I can’t see to estimate the middle, but I stop halfway back to Kirin and use my fingers to find the paint, adding a semicircle to the top of the line, able to make it out, my eyes finally used to the dark. Finally, I add more lines, rays emerging from the semicircle.
Not everyone in Lormere can read, but everyone knows what the rising sun looks like. I can see it perfectly—
I shouldn’t be able to see it.
Directly overhead, a guard is looking down at us, a torch held over the side of the wall, his face frozen.
Kirin, who has been watching the forest, turns, and I see his mouth fall open. “Run,” he hisses.
But something stills me, something in the guard’s face. Something desperate, and pleading. I gamble on it.
“The children are safe,” I call up as loudly as I dare. “Two miles into the forest.”
The man says nothing, still staring. Then: “Swear it.”
“I swear.”
“Can you keep them safe?” he whispers down, and I nod. “Go!” he hisses, jerking back, and I hear another voice.
Kirin drops the helmet to be found in the morning, and we move as fast as we dare for the woods.
“There! I see movement!”
My blood runs cold at the voice, high above us, and this time I don’t need to strain to hear the sound of arrows filling the air almost as soon as he’s spoken.
I put on a spurt of speed I didn’t know I was capable of and somehow make it back into the woods, the sounds of arrows hitting trees following me in. I turn and find Kirin right behind me, his eyes wide. He grabs my wrist and pulls me in deeper, until the sounds of outrage are distant.
We change direction, turning right and heading north, trying to stay parallel to the tree line. We jog, and run, and stumble, and even when my legs ache and my lungs burn and my sides feel as though I’ve been stabbed, I keep moving, my breath hoarse and heavy.
Eventually, Kirin changes direction again, and I follow, and we finally leave the woods. Ahead of us is what I hope is the small copse, and I finally begin to relax.
When we get there, Stuan and Nia are seated beneath a tree. The moment they see us they’re on their feet, racing toward us.
“You’re covered in paint,” Nia half sobs, half laughs as she pulls me into a fierce hug. “Not very stealthy.”
Beside us Stuan and Kirin clasp forearms, then embrace, too. As they part, Nia releases me and throws herself at Kirin. Stuan looks at me, and hesitates. I find myself grinning, and I raise my eyebrows at him suggestively. To my pleasure he blushes, be
fore reaching out and patting my shoulder gruffly, making me laugh.
“How was it?” Kirin asks.
“Just as you said,” Stuan says.
“He was brilliant,” Nia replies. “He did so many voices.”
Stuan’s color deepens. “Did you paint it?”
I nod. “The Rising Dawn. And I did a sun, too. For those who can’t read.”
“They spotted us running, though,” Kirin says. “They’ll see it straightaway. But I suppose it’s like you said, they’ll talk about it.”
“They will,” I say. “They’ll gossip and they’ll report it to Aurek. Word will get around. People will start asking questions. So we need to make sure we have answers for them. Get people into the towns. Find out if everyone is as loyal as they claim to be.”
“Like the man on the wall.”
I think of the guard who turned a blind eye to us.
“Like the man on the wall.”
“What?” Nia asks. “What man?”
“Come on,” I say. “It’s a long walk to the mountains. We’ll tell you on the way.”
The apothecary lies asleep at the top of a tower, in a bed that could easily fit her four times over. She’s propped up like a girl in a story, reclining against silken pillows that still smell faintly, to her mind, of another girl and are moth-eaten in places, but that doesn’t disturb the apothecary’s rest. Her short hair is fanned out like a halo across them, black in the moonlight. One hand lies on her stomach, the other curled beside her cheek. Her rosebud lips are parted slightly; her eyelids flutter as she dreams.
The prince is in her mind again.
In the dream they’re in another tower, one she doesn’t know but recognizes immediately from his descriptions: They’re in Tallith, standing inside one of the seven towers that orbit the central keep. From beside the window where she stands, she can see the bridges that link the towers to the keep and one another, so the Tallithi royals never have to walk on the ground if they choose not to.
She knows it’s a dream because she’s heard the reports that say all of the towers are now in ruins; five hundred years of neglect, and the unremarkable savagery of sea air and salt winds have eroded them into stumps, like the teeth of an addict. Yet now she sees them as they were: golden and beautiful.
The Scarecrow Queen Page 8
