by Kate Elliott
“Could you love me?”
Jaelle flushed. “I do love you.” It came out as a whisper. “But not, not as a woman loves a man. I cannot. I’m sorry.”
To her surprise, Katerina’s expression brightened. “Ah, gods, Jaelle, you have given me a precious gift, and I thank you for it.”
After that, Katerina seemed calmer. That evening she received Princess Rusudani and Lady Jadranka with equanimity. She even agreed to read aloud from The Recitation that had been translated into Taor, and Rusudani took advantage of the rapt attention given to Katerina’s reading to visit the screened-off chamber pot. Jaelle followed her, and there, trading places, she slipped the herbs into Rusudani’s waiting hands.
“I will remember this,” said Rusudani, and returned to the group seated so charmingly around Katerina.
Lady Jadranka lingered after the others had gone. “Lady Katherine,” she said in her calm way, “I hope you will remember, when all this is over, that my son has treated you kindly.”
“I am sorry, my lady,” said Katerina, and would say no more. Lady Jadranka sighed and left, and the guards closed and barred the door behind her.
“Blow out the lantern,” said Katerina, “so that our eyes may become accustomed to the dark.”
“Why?”
“Because whatever Rusudani means to do, she will do it tonight. And I, for one, do not mean to be caught unsuspecting.”
Gennady Berezin returned in late afternoon, none the worse for wear, and having seen but not spoken to Vasha and Katya. Too restless to sit still, Tess took a contingent of soldiers and rode a circuit of the walls.
White Tower was well placed, its west wall riding a bluff above a narrow river and the town growing out from its other sides. The docks lay within the great curve of the river out of which grew the bluff, but these river docks lay deserted now, abandoned because they had been built outside the ring of walls.
“If I had built this castle,” said Tess, “I would have carved a stairwell down to the river level from the castle, as a way to get supplies. Have you scouted out the land below the west wall?”
From here, just beyond catapult range and at the edge of the docks district, the castle loomed up into the heavens, a heavy slab limned by the light of the setting sun and by the sudden appearance of torches, like stars flickering to life.
One of the captains, an Arkhanov, replied. “We can’t scout there during the day. Our men are well within archery range. And at night… it’s steep, and impossible to see.”
Tess squinted at the sky. Clouds covered the east, drowning most of the sky, but a crescent moon lay just out of their reach. “As soon as there is the least bit of light, send men in. Try tonight, a preliminary expedition.”
“Will you make an alliance?”
“If I do not, will Prince Janos kill his hostages? I must think about it. We will hold a council tomorrow.”
In the last light of day, they rode back to camp. Tess ate mechanically, because she knew she ought to, but she was by now too tired to sleep. She sat in her chair under the awning until her hands got cold. But once inside the tent she felt choked, trapped, and so she grabbed a blanket and went outside again. She sat down again, nodded away into sleep, woke up with a start. Jumped to her feet. The night guards looked at her, questioningly.
“Gods, I need to walk.”
One of them fell into step beside her, and with his comforting presence, she walked through camp and out to the sentry line nearest the town. Here, in the concealing darkness of night, they stumbled across several interesting diversions, common enough in siegework: Among a contingent of Farisa Auxiliaries, they found two prostitutes from the town who had sneaked out to make a bit of coin.
“Send a man to follow them back in, as far as is safe,” said Tess to the embarrassed captain. “See if we might be able to get a group of men inside the town that way.”
A farmer was selling chickens, but he was not from the town; evidently he had been selling to the army for several days, coming in from the countryside. A robust herbwoman pushed a cart over the rough ground, peddling her wares, and in another jahar, farther on, the soldiers were good-naturedly trying to chase away a boy of about eleven years.
“He wants to hire himself out as a servant,” said the captain. “We think he came from town, but we’re not sure. There’re some straw tents down there by the river banks, with a few khaja left in them, those that didn’t run inside the walls. He might have come from there. No one wants the lad, poor thing. I don’t suppose he has any family left, or he’d not be wanting to leave his home.”
“Will anyone take him on?” Tess asked, feeling sorry for the scrawny child who lingered just within the glow of a fire. A soldier threw him a scrap of meat, and he wolfed it down.
“Just another mouth to feed,” said the captain, “and who knows if he can even ride? We don’t have any use for a khaja child like that.”
“There’s one more post beyond you?” Tess asked.
“One more, and then the river bank.”
A sentry’s voice broke the quiet. “Stanai!”
There was a general rustling all round as soldiers sprang up, and the captain and the night guard hustled Tess back a few steps. A male voice said, loudly, “Gods, another woman! Those khaja men must not truly be men if they keep their women so poorly satisfied that they all have to come out to us.”
“Aye. You don’t see jaran women running to them.”
But the voices stilled. Tess craned her neck and finally stepped out around the captain to see what had caused the sudden hush. Two fires down, a woman scrambled up a bank and into the circle of light lent by burning timbers. She was no prostitute, not gowned that richly, with her hair discreetly covered with a shawl. In one hand she clutched a small book. With the other—
Tess’s heart lurched. “Vladimir!” She said it loudly, but it came out a whisper. He looked like hell, but he was alive, setting the woman on her feet so that, as she turned to look behind her, Tess saw her face.
Princess Rusudani.
The sight galvanized Tess into action. She strode forward. “My lady! Princess Rusudani. What are you doing here?” What is Vladi doing here? Who else… who else?
Rusudani shook out her skirts. Eyes drawn down by the action, Tess saw that the fabric was wet and muddy to the knees, as if she had slogged through stagnant water. But the khaja princess looked up without the least sign of distress at her disheveled appearance. Indeed, she looked positively triumphant.
“Your highness,” she said, but as a challenge. In the last months she had learned to speak rough but serviceable Taor. “I come to make alliance with you.”
“Your husband has already offered an alliance.”
“I am not interested in what Prince Janos offers. He took me by force. I drugged the guards and the guards in the dungeon and these men fight the guards at the river stair. So I come to you, as God has willed. I want alliance with the jaran that is of my own making.”
“There he is,” said Vladi. “Stefan has him.”
To Tess, seeing and hearing Vladimir was dreamlike. He didn’t seem real. He couldn’t be real. Along with the others, he was dead.
“They whipped him last night,” said Vladi matter-of-factly to Tess, as if to explain something she ought to understand, but she did not know what he was talking about. “Gods, the stubborn fool would always talk back. You must speak to him, Tess. No one else can. He isn’t himself.”
Tess was so disoriented that at first she did not see the man himself, only the two figures helping him up the bank. She thought the odd murmuring that flooded around and past her was the spill of the river, though its speech had not seemed so loud to her a minute before. But it came from the jaran soldiers, and it crested back, farther still, moving away into the camp like a wave that swept all before it. He came full into the firelight, and Nikita and Stefan his escorts, dropped their arms away from him.
“In token of my good faith,” said Rusudani clearly, alm
ost as if she was gloating, her face shining in the firelight, “I release you.”
She was not talking to Tess.
Ilya was alive.
Or at least a man who looked like him was. He had the same deep brown eyes, the same face, scored now with a grim expression, that Tess dreamed of every night, when she dreamed at all, when she was troubled by dreams.
He said, in Ilya’s voice, “Mikhail waits at the river gate. Send twenty men, not more than thirty. Get them up the stairs quickly and inside the walls and they can open the gates. Ready the army. We strike now.”
Then, and only then, he looked at her.
“Oh, gods,” she said, because it was him. She staggered. The strength that had kept her going forward for the last many weeks drained out of her in one instant. Her vision blurred, and she thought she was going to faint.
Limping, he crossed the gap between them, but only to put a hand on her arm, marking her. “Tess,” he said. That was all.
He let go of her and limped over to Vladimir, giving him directions.
Tess stared, unable to take her eyes from him. Already, around her, around Ilya, around Rusudani, men moved. A group of them followed Vladimir off into the night, and others hurried off toward the main camp.
“He wanted to lead the raid himself,” Nikita was saying to someone, “so I threatened to hamstring him if he wouldn’t listen to reason. It was his crazy ideas that got us in this trouble in the first place.”
Out of the buzz, Tess picked up, again, the slow song of the river, out of sight in the darkness. High up to her left, a handful of torches shimmered and blazed on the castle walls.
Rusudani placed a hand possessively on Ilya’s arm, just above the elbow. “I hope you will show me to a place of safety, my lord.”
Tess snapped to life. “Captain, show Princess Rusudani to my tent.” Sheer, ugly jealousy coursed energy back through her, and she conceived a sudden and unconditional dislike for the khaja woman. Rusudani caught her eye, and Tess knew instantly that for the first time in years, for the first time, perhaps, since Vera Veselov, she had just gained an adversary. Rusudani did not relinquish her grip on Ilya’s arm. Just then, Gennady Berezin ran up and Rusudani was forced to step away so that the two men might embrace. Even so, Ilya stepped stiffly out of the embrace, distracted, looking again and again up at the castle.
“No,” said Nikita, who did not stray from his side. “You are not going in.”
“I must go in,” said Ilya. Two welts marked his cheek, covering the mark of marriage. Tess felt like she was looking at a stranger. He had recognized her, but that was all. Something else held him, something stronger, something that she did not share in.
“Then with the main army,” said Nikita in a weary voice, as if he had argued this once too often and was finally ready to give up the fight.
“You’re not going in with the raiding party!” exclaimed Tess. “Not while I’m here to stop you.”
“I must kill him,” said Ilya, but not truly to her. “I have sworn it.”
In the firelight, Rusudani smiled.
Beyond, behind, Tess heard the eerie rustling of thousands of men donning their armor in the middle of the night.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Hunt
IN THE SOLAR, CANDLES guttered. Vasha drifted off to sleep, chin cupped on a hand, and his elbow slipped off the table. Starting awake, he slapped a hand down on the table to catch himself, scattering game pieces. A few fell to the floor, but they hit the carpet without a sound. He looked quickly around the chamber.
Janos stood by the hearth, conferring with Captain Maros in a low voice. Rusudani had retired to the bedchamber many hours ago, or so it seemed to Vasha, gauging time by the height of the candles. Six guards stood by the door, and two more lounged at their ease about five steps from Vasha. No doubt they were pleased enough that Janos had not chosen to send his hostage back to the tower, where it would be colder. During a siege it was necessary to conserve both manpower and wood, just as Lady Jadranka and the other ladies all slept upstairs together this night, for comfort and for safety. Janos gestured to one of his guards and the man helped him on with his coat of plates and then his great helm. Together with his captain, Janos left. Lord Belos padded over and offered more wine to Vasha, and he drank it gratefully, wondering what was going on.
But evidently Janos had just gone for a tour of the battlements, since he returned after a short time. A soldier unlaced the prince’s armor and set it aside and pulled off his boots, and another man dragged out a pallet. Janos lay his sword down beside the pallet and himself, clad in hose and shirt, down on the mattress. Within moments, he seemed to be asleep. Vasha watched the chamber for a bit, but a hush had fallen. It was not precisely quiet; there was too much tension in the air for that. But it was still, like the calm before the storm.
He picked up the pieces that had fallen to the floor, knight, castle, and archer, and put them back on the game board. Then he stretched out on the rug and pillowed his head on an arm, shutting his eyes. Someone draped a blanket over him. A log shifted on the fire. A guardsman whispered. A spear haft thumped gently on the floor as a guardsman changed position, and mail chinked, overlaid by the brief scrape of plate against mail as another guardsman moved. A man coughed.
Vasha drifted off to sleep.
Jaelle started awake, but it was only a log slipping on the fire, rolling down into the deepest coals and sending a spray of sparks popping out from the hearth. Katerina had dragged the table closer to the fire. By the light of two candles she played castles against herself, moving first a white piece, then a red. Her hair was neatly braided, the braids thrown back over one shoulder. Although she wore a gown, she had put her jaran women’s trousers—fuller than men’s trousers above the knee and narrow at the ankle, sewn of striped fabric—on underneath. A cloak lay over the back of the chair.
“Aren’t you going to sleep?” Jaelle asked for the fourth time.
Katerina stood and walked to each of the arrowslits in turn, pausing longest by those that looked over the river. She cocked her head to one side. “Did you hear that?”
Jaelle did not hear anything.
Katerina crossed to the arrowslit that looked out over the courtyard, her figure a swathe of shadow against the darker stone. She leaned forward, and suddenly she went taut.
“Look!” she whispered.
Jaelle scrambled up from the pallet, untangled her legs from her skirts and hurried over to Katerina, who moved aside to make room for her. She peered out through the slit, eyes already adjusted to the darkness. She saw a length of wall, rimmed with torches that illuminated the guards standing at attention, watching out over the walls toward the besieging army beyond. And below, a shadow crept along the wall beneath, slipping in and out of patches of night. A slim scar of metal caught briefly in torchlight and winked, and was still, swallowed up in shadow again.
“They’ve come,” said Katerina, turning and walking calmly back to the chair, where she lifted the cloak off and swung it around her shoulders. Her voice was calm, but her body trembled.
“Who has come?”
“The jaran.”
“How would they get inside?”
“Why would Princess Rusudani buy sleeping draughts if not to drug guards? There must be a second entrance, a side gate, a water gate. Other fortresses have fallen by treachery from within. I have seen it myself. Hush.”
They listened but heard nothing except a hound yipping, the brush of wind across the slate roof, and the slow murmur and snap of the fire. Distant, a new, fainter sound carried in to them, a muted rumbling.
“It must be the gate!” cried Katerina, and she ran back to the arrowslit, squeezing herself forward into it as far as she could. Jaelle pressed in behind her, but could see nothing.
And there, rising out of the darkness as piercing as light, came the clarion cry of a horn, sounded in alarm. It cut off abruptly and hard against it rose the sound of fighting, distant at first, coming
closer.
Katerina wedged her head into the opening and yelled, down toward the courtyard, words in her own language, that Jaelle could barely understand: “Stanai! I am here! Look to me here!”
She shoved herself out of the window seat. “Put your cloak on!” she cried. “Get ready!”
Jaelle could not move. She could scarcely breathe. Katerina moved to the fire and stuck a long, arm’s width log into the flames, getting the end to catch and burn. Jaelle realized numbly that she was preparing a weapon.
Shouts rose from the base of the tower. There came a sudden burst of fighting, followed by the pound of footsteps up the stairs. Shocked into action, Jaelle grabbed her cloak from the chest just as the door burst open.
“Come,” said Katerina. That was all. No other word was spoken as she entered the ranks of her people and, vanishing into them, started down the steps toward the battle now raging throughout the castle.
Jaelle hesitated. She glanced once round the chamber, luxurious in its way and familiar in its trappings, and then at the foreign soldiers who waited, impatiently, for her to move. But her decision had already been made. She had already in every important way changed her allegiance irrevocably.
She shrugged the cloak over her shoulders and followed Katerina down the stairs. The jaran soldiers closed in at her back protectively, and in this way they left Widow’s Tower behind.
Vasha dreamt of bells, ringing to signal the coming of the jaran army. Except it was not the bells. It was the clatter and pound of the armorer’s hall, the incessant, uneven clash of hammers on iron, the birthplace of swords.
He woke up. In the unearthly quiet of deep night, he could still hear the distant hammering from the armory, plying their trade on through the night. Boots pounded outside. A horn rose in alarm, cut off abruptly. On the pallet on the other side of the solar, Janos sat up, shaking sleep away. The door burst open, and a guardsman tumbled in.
“My lord! Your highness! Captain Maros, the gates are open! We’re being attacked.”
