by Ellyn, Court
The open gate screamed an invitation. The half dozen ogres who’d crossed the river hefted axes dripping purple blood and charged the fortress. If even this few got inside.… The wounded graybeard on the riverbank was trying to crawl to safety, but they couldn’t wait for him. “Close the portcullis!” Jaedren shouted. “Close it now! Close it, close it!” Please listen to me.
Someone must’ve thought it a good idea, because the chains rattled and the iron grate came crashing down.
Jaedren raced down the wallwalk and around the bulging belly of the tower and into the shadow of the gate. The six ogres bashed against the portcullis with the axes, their shoulders, even their helmeted heads, but the iron held fast.
Maegeth hurried past. “Your Grace, please go back inside.”
“What is going on?” Rhoslyn demanded. She stood in the middle of the courtyard in a sparkling evening gown. Lura waited on the steps behind her, mouth open at the sight of bleeding, sobbing townspeople and arming soldiers.
“Ilswythe is under attack.” Maegeth sounded irritated with the duchess’s lack of obedience.
“But—” Rhoslyn found Jaedren among the roiling surge of soldiers and waved him to her. Fear widened her hazel eyes. “Is this what Thorn was worried about?”
He nodded, found that he was shaking and gasping uncontrollably. His lips tingled, but he couldn’t stop gasping. Red on the wind, red on the road.
The duchess’s hands squeezed his shoulders; her eyes bored into him. “Breathe slow and calm. Brave. We need you to be brave, Jaedren. We have to keep our heads. What would Kelyn have us do? Huh?”
Red on the wind. “I don’t know,” he sobbed. “The archers can’t see them to shoot them.”
“Archers? Good. You can tell them where to aim, yes?”
He nodded again. His breathing was slower now. The black spots cleared from his eyes.
“All right, you tell them. Maegeth, watch him. We’ll see to these people. Lura! Help me change.”
She bustled off, sweeping up a river-soaked child as she went. The townspeople followed her into the keep. Jaedren felt better now. He was a knight-in-training, he reminded himself, not some panicky pigherder. He ran after Maegeth, up the wallwalk and onto the battlements.
Three companies of ogres finally finished pouring over the hill and ranged out across the fields on the far side of town. The flag-bearer planted the banner beside the town well. Two washerwomen lay beneath it, their wet laundry strewn over the ground. The rider of the black horse had advanced through town and lounged almost leisurely in the saddle on the far bank. Only this morning Jaedren had asked Etivva if she’d ever seen an elf. The irony made him want to cry. Thorn said elves were good. Why was this one leading an attack on Ilswythe?
The elf ordered one of the companies forward. The ogres crossed the Avidan, clustering tight behind raised shields. They were soon well within range, but Ilswythe’s archers squinted down at nothing more than a muddy foot-pocked road, and their arrows remained in their quivers. “Shoot them!” Jaedren ran down the lines of archers, shaking the men and women by their arms. “Shoot them! Look for the new tracks they make in the mud! Captain, tell them!”
Maegeth bellowed, “Archers, nock arrows!”
“There, there! Climbing the hill!” Jaedren jabbed a finger through the crenels, hopping up and down.
“Aim! Loose!”
Two dozen arrows took flight, all aimed in the same direction. Three ogres suddenly appeared, their power over the Veil lost with their lives, and fell hard to the ground. Arrows made them look like pincushions. Others brayed in pain, but only Jaedren saw them tear the arrows from their flesh and keep marching in formation.
“We got ‘em!” cried an archer.
“What the hell are those things?”
Jaedren called to anyone who would listen, “There are hundreds of them. Keep it up!”
Ogres shrieked and collapsed under the onslaught of arrows, but their shields were wide and thick. Massive arms held them high in a shell formation, and most won their way to the gate. Only from directly above them could Jaedren see that inside the barrier of shields, the ogres carried an iron-banded tree trunk. “Battering ram!” he shouted. The thudding began at once. It was a thunder that jarred Jaedren’s teeth and thumped his hands from the wall.
“Shut the inner doors,” Maegeth ordered. “Remember the padding. This isn’t a drill, people! Nock! Loose! Straight down the wall, idiot. Use your damn ears. Do we have archers manning the murder holes? You and you, go!”
On the far side of the river, the horn blasted a short note and a second company started across the ford. The ogre wearing the plate armor led them along the riverbank, taking a wide path around the base of the castle, just beyond bowshot. “Aster, where are they going?”
“Ilswythe has two gates, love,” she said.
“Captain!” he cried, pointing. “A second ram. They’re going for the north gate.”
Maegeth dispatched half the garrison to meet the threat. Jaedren couldn’t be in two places at once. How was he to help the soldiers at both gates?
“You have to flee, love,” Aster said. Her smile was so sad.
“Flee? But I need to—”
“If the naenion break in, they will take you like they took the others.”
Jaedren remembered his dream about the raven-haired girl. The green men had killed her, he was more certain than ever. “No! No, I can’t. Kelyn wouldn’t flee. He’d stay and fight. So will I.” If only he was older. The sword in his belt would be a real one, with a razor sharp edge and a name to make him feel bold.
All too soon the second ram started knocking at the north gate. A distant cheer came from the archers there; they must have killed an ogre.
The duchess emerged from the keep, this time wearing a sensible woolen day dress. Etivva joined her, limping on her wooden foot. They climbed the wallwalk to have a look for themselves. Rhoslyn’s hand jumped to her mouth when she saw the village. Bodies littered the streets. Black smoke rose from the mill’s windows. More curled white from the thatched roof of a cottage. Etivva looked to the skies, lips moving in silent prayer.
“The villagers are settled in the Great Hall,” the duchess said, throat tight. “Captain, have you received word from His Lordship?”
“You would’ve been the first to know, Your Grace, I’m sorry.”
“Did this invisible enemy make no ultimatum, no terms for surrender?”
“No, ma’am.”
Rhoslyn’s nod was slow and heavy, like one fighting dizziness. “Will they break through?”
Maegeth took her time answering. “We’ll hold them as best we can, for as long as we can. If the Goddess is good, Lord Kelyn will return, see we’re in trouble, let the king know, and raise the militias. If we can hold out until then, we’ll be all right. Our stores are full. If Valryk had informed us sooner that he meant to move the Assembly, that wouldn’t be the case.”
Etivva’s prayer ended suddenly. She glanced down at Jaedren and placed a hand tenderly under his chin. Her smile crinkled the crescent-shaped scars on her cheek. “We cannot fight this army. Can we?”
Jaedren’s eyes burned with rising tears. “Aster says we have to flee.”
“Out into the open?” Rhoslyn shook her head, not liking that idea. “Both gates are besieged. How would we get out? Kelyn never mentioned Ilswythe having tunnels.”
Maegeth shifted feet, uneasy. “It does. Or, well, it did. I’m not sure anymore.”
“Explain, Captain,” Rhoslyn demanded. The gates shuddered under the hammering of the rams. Bowstrings twanged. Ogres roared. The stink of rotting meat wafted over the walls.
“The tunnels haven’t been used in two hundred years, Your Grace, not since Tallon’s rebellion. They may have collapsed by now. I don’t know if the doors at the far end are even workable. There was no need—”
“The safety of this fortress and its people has been in your hands, Captain! Does Kelyn know of your neglect? What if one of
the lords of the Northwest began to think of himself as another Tallon? What if the Fierans had overrun Aralorr during the last war? No need?”
“Your Grace, I’m sure—”
“We don’t have time for this. Collapsed or not, we have to try. We have to get the household and their families out of here. If we win through, you won’t have to worry about the extra mouths to feed. We’ll raise the militias ourselves and get word to Bramoran.”
Maegeth beckoned to two of her sergeants, both of them older men who had served His Lordship and his father before him. “Angson, Nael, you know the tunnels? Your job is to escort Her Grace safely through, whatever it takes.”
“We’ll need shovels, no doubt,” said the one called Angson, a beefy man-at-arms with a beard long enough to tuck into his belt. Nael, skinny and pox-scarred, agreed with a nod and a grunt.
“Get them and anything else you might need. Plenty of food. Lanterns and oil. If you come to a block you can’t dig through, stay down there until I announce the all-clear.”
Rhoslyn recruited Etivva and Jaedren to help her round up the household and order them to gather at the main gatehouse. Several of the scullery maids and washerwomen fought the order. “I’m not going into the gatehouse. That gate could break down any minute,” said a woman drawing at the well, “I’ll stay right ‘ere and see to me duty. Somebody’s got to stitch up the wounded, eh?” Some of the footmen doffed their fine livery, deciding to take up bows on the wall instead; others said to hell with that, they were getting out. Nelda refused to leave her kitchen under any circumstances. “I will see that our soldiers are fed.” She made sure each man, woman, and child had bread and cheese enough for three days. As she tied the sackcloth around each bundle of food, she tucked apples and cakes into those that went to the youngsters. The smith kept pouring hot iron into arrowhead molds while his assistants learned from the fletcher how to assemble arrows quickly. No one asked them to flee into the tunnels, and they didn’t bother leaving the smithy.
The portcullis rattled with each strike of the ram. If the iron grate gave way, the ogres still had the bronze-banded oaken doors to contend with. Captain Maegeth beckoned for the duchess and her household at the door of the guardroom. The ledger table and watchman’s desk had been swept aside; a square door had been raised up from the floor. A ladder, not a stair, descended into darkness. Jaedren stared at that dark hole like it was a mouth waiting to swallow him whole. “Angson and Nael have already headed down,” Maegeth said. “When you get to the bottom, Your Grace, you’ll see a path to the left and another to the right. The right-hand path comes out in the town hall on the square, so you’ll want to turn left. That will take you north. It’s at least two miles of tunnel, but if it’s clear you’ll surface in the livery of Bransdon village. Here, take a lantern. Flint and iron are attached to the chain. Goddess go with you. Jaedren?” Maegeth pushed a lantern into his hand as well and nudged him toward that gaping throat. Down he went, one-handed, his lantern lighting a musty, nitre-coated wall to each side, the rung below his feet, the top of Rhoslyn’s head below that, and nothing else. He’d read once that, long ago, men used to bury their dead instead of burn them. Graves and tombs those holes in the ground were called, and the old tales said they stank of dust and bone and cold, ancient death. He supposed the smell of these tunnels was what those tales meant.
Men’s voices rose from far below. “There we are, Your Grace, just a little farther.”
The shaft ended, giving way to impenetrable darkness to either side. A pair of strong arms lifted him down from the ladder. One of the soldiers helped Etivva down next. Babies wailed higher up the shaft, their cries thin and echoing. The duchess’s face, lit brightly by her flickering lantern, smiled down at him, though her mouth trembled.
Once the last stableboy descended the ladder, Longbeard Angson lit a torch with the lantern hanging on his belt and raised it high. Soot blackened the low arched ceiling and revealed support beams sagging under the weight of earth and stone and centuries. “Slow she goes now,” he said and started off into the dark. With a long-hafted spade he felt for the levelness of the path and tapped the beams and walls for signs of weakness. Dust shivered down from the old wood, and water dripped down on Jaedren’s head. Water gathered in rank, cold pools, too, that climbed halfway up his boots. Even down here, with twenty feet of earth between him and the surface he could hear the ram thudding at the main gate. The sound dwindled as they crept through the dark. He could tell that they neared the north gate when the thunder of the second ram shook earth from the ceiling. After that there was silence, deep dark silence broken by the dripping of water, the shuffle and trip of a hundred feet, the cry of a baby, and the whispers of frightened men and women. These people didn’t have to be as brave as Jaedren did. He was to be a knight and that meant he had to feel no fear. At least, that’s what he suspected, even though Kelyn never said so.
Still, he took comfort in Etivva’s hand hovering nearby. She depended on his lantern to see, and murmured soft prayers as she hobbled along beside him.
He suspected they were well away from the castle when Sergeant Angson called a halt. Quiet Nael came up from the rear of the line and the two of them inspected a jumble of tree roots that had grown through the stone arch and collapsed a section of the ceiling. “I can see to the other side,” Angson said, and Nael grunted. They ordered a rest and the fugitives found dry places to sit and complain. “I’m hungry. I’m wet. I’m scared. I wanna go home.” Amazing how many ways different folks could grumble about the same thing in so short a time. Jaedren was glad the darkness hid his face; else, they would see him rolling his eyes. A young woman sitting across the tunnel from him started sobbing softly. An older woman hugged her and whispered, “He’ll be all right.” Was her beloved an archer of the garrison, perhaps, or one of the footmen who had stayed?
The townsman who had crossed the ford carrying the girl and the baby offered to help the two soldiers dig through the roots and rubble. Jaedren leaned into Etivva with her arm tight around him, kinda wishing they could stay here until Captain Maegeth came to tell them they’d beaten the ogres back, but Rhoslyn urged the diggers to hurry. The news they carried was urgent.
Before the fugitives could decide whether or not to break into their food supply, Angson announced their success. Nael led the way this time, shimmying through a break in the roots and climbing over a moldy mound of earth. He disappeared on the other side, but his torch bobbed ahead, orange and encouraging. The others followed one at a time. Etivva had to go slowly, or her wooden foot might fall off, she said with a snicker.
They had to stop frequently after that. All the men and working women took turns digging through cave-ins. “It’s hopeless. We should turn back,” became the complaint. “We’ll never make it.” Rhoslyn ordered them onward.
When they finally stopped to eat, Jaedren felt as if they’d been walking for miles, but Angson said they had a long way to go yet. “There’s supposed to be a well at the halfway point. We’ll see if old stories are true, eh?”
Hadn’t the ogres proven that? Jaedren decided asking would be impertinent.
“I saw an elf, Etivva,” he whispered around a mouthful of black bread. She lowered her ear so she could hear him. “I’ll bet Thorn never met this one though. The elves he talks about don’t attack innocent people.”
“No, I am sure they don’t.”
Once the way was clear, the fugitives tied up their bundles of food and climbed through the mud. They did a lot of crawling now. Centuries of rain had washed entire fields into the tunnels so that the ceiling was too low to walk upright. If the well Angson spoke of existed, mud had filled it up long ago.
Sergeant Nael’s fist darted up. The fugitives drew to a gradual halt, bumping into each other, pressing their neighbors aside so they could see what the newest obstacle was. Nael handed off his torch to no one in particular and crawled ahead into the dark. He crawled back moments later. “Moonlight,” he said.
Ang
son scurried forward to see for himself. When he came back he told the duchess, “There’s an opening, all right. Good thing, too. The tunnel’s blocked again just past it. Poked my head out into fresh night air. It’s not the livery though. An old oak broke through the ceiling. We can climb up the roots.”
“Is it safe?” Rhoslyn asked. “How far is Bransdon?”
“Lights about a hundred yards to the north. We can make it now.”
Rhoslyn breathed a sigh of relief and turned to smile at Lura and Esmi, Etivva and Jaedren and the rest. Her face was smeared brown with mud. So were Etivva’s and the handmaids’. Jaedren suspected he looked like he’d had a mud-bath himself.
Nael stayed in the tunnel to help the fugitives maneuver up the oak tree’s roots, while Angson climbed up and lifted everybody out. Night air never smelled so sweet. Jaedren hoped he’d never have to see another pit as dark and terrifying again. How glorious the low ragged clouds, pink with Forath’s bloody light. Men, women, and children alike celebrated their escape with laughter and sobs. “Keep it down,” Angson ordered. “Stay together. Make for the lights of town.”
The fickle moonlight taunted them with brief glimpses of the hills and hedgerows. Jaedren made out a swath of black trees cloaking the dim lights of a small town. The duchess, however, gazed back the other way. On a far hill, the ruddy glow of a large fire. “They’re burning the village,” she muttered. “You don’t think it’s the keep, do you?”
Lura leaned close and whispered words of reassurance.
Rhoslyn raised her chin, grabbed Jaedren’s hand and that of her handmaid and turned them toward Bransdon. They trudged across open meadow and onto a cart lane that led them into the trees. Two rows of cottages spread out quietly to each side of the lane. All the while, Jaedren searched with Veil Sight, but the only lifelights belonged to humans. Aster’s soft blue tracers circled one cottage, then the next, darted up into the livery’s loft and down the smithy’s chimney as she inspected the town for any sign of danger.
