King's Shield

by Sherwood Smith

  Tau’s color faded for a moment, and everyone there twitched or grimaced.

  “We left the animal with the Lindeth Harbor outer perimeter guard—we chanced to catch them—and I brought Nightingale here.”

  “Buck—” Nightingale lifted his one working hand.

  Mistake. His mouth opened, and his body, rigidly held until his messages were discharged, failed him at last. He began to crumple, but Barend and Rat caught him as he fainted.

  “Rat,” Evred said, and Barend as well as Rattooth looked up, sharp Cassad faces wearing identical expressions.

  Barend had been called Rat for years aboard a pirate ship before Inda’s mutiny freed him. He grimaced, and his cousin cast him a rueful look as Evred went on, “You and Vedrid get Nightingale down to the lazaretto.” To Tau, “Is there anything else?”

  “Only this. Buck told Nightingale to tell you that if the Venn kept hanging off the coast, he was going to stay put, and maybe try to look like a force twice the size of what he actually had. He’d had the foresight to get his Runners to keep the horses in the gully alongside a stream adjacent to the road, so there were no silhouettes on the horizon for the Venn to count. But if they land anyway, it’s going to be roughly two hundred to one.”

  After the commanders breakfasted with the prince, Dag Erkric departed from the Venn flagship on unnamed duties, as had become his habit. Durasnir was about to make his morning ship inspection when an orderly summoned him to the after cabin, where the dispatches came in.

  “Hyarl my Commander.” He put his hands together in the mode of orders given. “You said to come to you at any time if we receive anything from warship Petrel.”

  Durasnir sat down. News from Captain Seigmad, the Battle Group Captain he had placed in charge of the transport to Lindeth Harbor, could not be good. Seigmad was even older than Durasnir, sixty years of wind, weather, and sea in the king’s service. He would report only problems.

  We were forced to abort the landing. What at first we took to be a sizable force was lying in ambush awaiting us. The night scouts now believe this force is little more than skirmishers, perhaps detached from the army at Ala Larkadhe. Without definite numbers, and because we have lost the advantage of surprise, Hilda Battle Chief Hrad demands we abandon this site and move in all haste to the north side of Lindeth, despite the rocky shore and adverse winds.

  Durasnir wrote a hasty note saying that they should comply, but that they must wait for the most advantageous wind and tide, and sent it off.

  Then he continued his inspection, which was in part a search. The prince had shown no interest in the latest dispatches, which alarmed Durasnir. It was so uncharacteristic. Where had the prince gone? He was not in his cabin, nor prowling around the mages’ portion of the ship. Nor was he below.

  When Durasnir climbed back to the weather deck, his eye was drawn upward by the glint of white and silver of the Erama Yaga. They stood guard on the masthead. That meant the prince had clambered all the way to the topgallants. He had gone even higher than he’d loved to perch as a small boy.

  Tradition said that anyone captain or above did not risk his dignity by climbing to the tops unless under direct threat of attack. Durasnir climbed past the strictly schooled faces of the Erama Yaga and squeezed between the shrouds on the narrow planking that pitched slowly on the sleepy summer sea.

  Rajnir sat on the narrower topgallant masthead. He leaned back against the spar, eyes closed, so relaxed Durasnir could see the veins in the prince’s eyelids. Durasnir recognized how gradually he had become accustomed to extreme tension in the prince.

  “My prince,” he said.

  Rajnir opened his eyes. “Don’t say anything, Uncle Fulla.” He gave a soft sigh. “I know it’s not seemly to climb up. But I can breathe here. I . . . the wind clears my head.”

  Durasnir touched his fingertips together in acknowledgment, then said as gently as he could, “If you truly regard me as Uncle Fulla then you will permit me an uncle’s trespass?”

  Rajnir sighed again. “What have I done? What must I hear?”

  “Only this. That Captain Henga is a good man. One of the best Drenga captains we have. This is why he was chosen for the honor of leading the advance guard on Castle Andahi. What—” Dag Erkric might not have told you, “—you might not know is that the defense of the castle was ferocious. Courageous, too. That must be acknowledged.”

  Rajnir leaned back, his eyes closing.

  Durasnir went on. “Those women were armed and trained warriors. They sabotaged the castle, and killed almost half of Henga’s entire force before his men finally gained control. And not a single defender, young or old, was left alive, because they kept on the attack to the very last. I will not be surprised if taking that castle does not end up being one of the harshest battles of this invasion.”

  And if not, we are marching straight into more grief than we’ve endured in centuries.

  “So I beg you to reconsider your view of Henga’s execution.”

  Rajnir opened his eyes and said, “Who?”

  Durasnir stared into those blue eyes, so wide, so incurious. The skin over the backs of his hands tingled painfully.

  “Thank you, my prince,” he said.

  Rajnir did not ask for what, so uninterested was he. One corner of his mouth lifted, then he closed his eyes again. The wind tousled a strand of his fair hair that had escaped its clip, and he breathed softly and steadily.

  Durasnir climbed down. He finished his round of the flagship, and then sat down at the dispatch desk. Waving the duty ensigns off, he sorted the Oneli commands, scrupulously written and dispatched by magic, and then he turned to the Hilda commands. From the beginning, Rajnir had granted Dag Erkric and Oneli Commander Durasnir permission to read them, which Erkric did regularly. Durasnir read them seldom. He had tried to maintain that distance between the services that protected parity.

  Had protected parity. He read them all thoroughly now.

  The only recent order for Captain Henga of the advance guard at Castle Andahi was a commendation, written out in Erkric’s hand, above the prince’s name.

  There were many of these orders written by Dag Erkric above the prince’s name. And a few above other names, including Durasnir’s; the prince often gave them orders to write for him.

  So no hard evidence there.

  Durasnir closed off the well-trod mental path about the dangers of mages. Here was a new path, as yet shadowed and perilous: for the first time Fulla Durasnir comprehended that he was not just set opposite Erkric in an adversarial position. That would be all right. It was part of the balance of power, of compromise, of parity. They spoke the truth expecting to hear other points of view, so that the king or his heir could determine the right path.

  Did Erkric speak the truth, or shape it in secret?

  Specifically, why had Prince Rajnir, who had debated the niceties of diplomatic usage with Durasnir’s own son Vatta when they were about twelve years old, think that a truce was an opportunity for treachery? Every day it seemed the prince sounded less like a man nearing thirty, and more like a boy of ten. And now he was up on the masthead, higher than he’d sat as a boy, because it made his head clear . . .

  And I cannot ask because I regard Erkric as an enemy. A dag—with all that magical power that none could gainsay—as an enemy.

  Evred waited for Inda to speak. They all regarded Inda with the “what now” expression.

  Inda beckoned to Tdiran-Randviar, standing there grim and silent the entire time. “You said something about a defense plan?”

  The old woman said tersely, “Dewlap Arveas’ Jarlan, Liet Tlen, is an old friend from queen’s training days. Had a plan for making a castle into a trap. We talked about it once. When the word first reached us those shits were coming over in their boats.”

  Inda’s lips parted. “Can you extend your plan to this city?”

  “I can try.”

  Inda turned his head. “Barend. Take everyone you’ve got. Every arrow you’
ve got. Split ’em up. Reinforce Buck with one group, get someone north of Lindeth to intercept that landing.”

  “That’s all rock.” Tau chopped his hands up and down. “I scanned it myself with the scout. Deadly landing.”

  “Exactly. So if you wanted to take us by surprise, and we were lying in wait right where you were going to land in the best spot, where would you go next? I’d go to the worst lonely spot beyond the harbor spyglasses.”

  “North shore,” three voices said.

  Rat had quietly returned. “But if they’ve got an advance force of a thousand just to clear the landing space, and we’ve got maybe that for each group, and no reinforcements—”

  “The idea is, you don’t let ’em land. They can’t sneak ships in—” Inda’s voice hitched when he remembered Dag Erkric and magic. Then he remembered what Signi had said, and continued firmly, “You’ll see the landing boats coming in. Don’t let ’em land. Eventually they will anyway, especially if they figure out how few of us there are, but for now—until Ola-Vayir gets here—that’s going to have to do.”

  Evred said to the Randviar, “If they do land, and break through, your orders are to mire them as long as you can in city fighting.”

  Before Tau first appeared, Tdiran-Randviar had been thinking about what it meant if the Venn reached the pass. It meant that Liet Tlen and the Arveas guardswomen would be dead, because Liet would never let a Venn past her threshold while she lived.

  “You leave them to me,” she said fiercely.

  Chapter Eleven

  AT first, all the Castle Andahi children had to see the Venn. They scrambled to the entrance to the robbers’ cave.

  Han ordered them back in a voiceless whisper, making terrible faces and violent hand motions instead of yelling like she so badly wanted to. All she got was mutinous looks, nasty hand signs back, and pokes from the eight-year-olds to “go anyway”—a mutiny. At least it was a quiet one. They were trained enough not to make noise with an enemy nigh.

  Gdir’s sour expression made Han think of order—and then she got an idea.

  She left Hal on watch at the cavern entrance and beckoned for everyone to surround her as she retreated all the way to the stream, where she hoped the rush of water would smother whispers.

  “Whoever is standing straight and quiet,” she said low-voiced, quoting her first arms mistress back at Tlen. “Any noise, you lose your turn.”

  A hissing scrabble and all the children, right down to the smallest, got into line. They all knew that command.

  “Not the smalls,” Han muttered to Lnand. “You’ll get a turn. I’ll watch them when the sixes are done.”

  Lnand sighed loudly, then cut out the smalls, promising them a fingerful of honey to lick if they sat down like creep-mice.

  At first it was interesting, watching the Venn march by, so tall, so many of them yellow-haired, just like most of their own people. They carried a different kind of sword, and most of them had these odd round shields that Hal insisted in a whisper (that still earned a stinging swat on the top of his head from Han) were really rain covers.

  Two of the eights started a whispered contest about what kind of turds they were made of and Han thrust them out of line to wait at the back. No one talked after that.

  The first time through, Han counted to a hundred for each pair. The second time, the children were less eager, so she let each pair stay longer. By the third time they got bored fast, especially when they couldn’t talk. So everyone retreated all the way to the back of the cave, to where the stream came out of a fissure in the rock. They got the pent-up words out of their systems.

  The younger ones wanted to ask questions: where were their horses? Why did they have brass horn things on their helms? Did they have an academy for their jarls? The eights all wanted to offer disgusting ideas about how to fight them, variations on not using the Waste Spell and throwing their own droppings at the enemy, only could they do it and not get chased?

  Han told them exactly what Liet-Jarlan would do if they tried it, and no, that was not snitching, because she’d be required to give a field report on all action, and turd-hurling was action. The eights couldn’t argue with that.

  As the steady march of footsteps echoed up the stone, more and more Venn emerging from the tunnel without any end in sight, the children returned to their old games, but quietly. Except when Billykid, the leader of the eight-year-olds, who was always acting the goat he resembled, tried to sneak to the cavern entrance and mount their low wall in order to shy just one rock.

  Han slapped him down so hard he went tumbling. But when he sucked in a breath to yell, Gdir reached him first, and stuffed the hem of her smock into his mouth so hard he began to choke, legs kicking, hands clawing desperately though ineffectively, as they were pinned by her knees.

  Into his purpling face and frightened eyes she hissed, “Shut it! Shut it! One noise and I’ll kill you myself.”

  Billykid turned up both thumbs as best he could with his scrawny wrists pinned to the cavern floor. He looked more like a goat than ever when she turned him loose and he sloped to the back to pout and make vile gestures at Han and Gdir.

  Somehow Billykid changed everything, even though he never got to throw a stone at the Venn. Maybe it was going to happen anyway, maybe it was the result of Billykid’s muttered threats and insults, but once the last of the Venn had vanished up the pass in the other direction, and even their marching thrump, thrump, thrump had stopped echoing down the pass from above, arguments burst out.

  As always, Lnand was the loudest and most persistent, shouting everyone down until she had their attention. “We have to go check the castle. We just have to,” she began in a tragic tone, and went in an anguished, quivering voice: surely someone was there. Her father was smart, so was the Jarlan. Maybe they’d decided there were too many Venn, and they were hiding.

  In Lnand’s mind, it was all over. She had an intense, bright vision of all the grown-ups crowding around, proclaiming the children to be heroes for staying put while the Venn . . . did whatever they were doing. She very badly wanted to get home, get praise, and maybe her father would make honey-topped cornbread for everyone.

  But there was no agreement in either Han’s or Gdir’s faces. She stamped her foot. “You with two parents might not care, but I only have a father, and I might even be an orphan!”

  Han’s mind had been wandering, the way it always did when Lnand acted the pug. So she was as surprised as anyone when one moment Lnand was standing in the center of all the children, her palm to her heart, and then she was tussling in the dust with Gdir, kicking, gouging, grunting and yowling in a horrible struggle that looked and sounded like the castle cats during mating season.

  The children all gave voice, the older boys shrieking with laughter, shouting insults and encouragements, the smalls wailing and sobbing.

  Han screamed, “Stop! Stop!” until her throat hurt.

  No one was listening.

  She looked around. No, she couldn’t use a weapon, though she wanted to. Ah! The ensorcelled bucket.

  Five steps. Splash! Cold water hit squarely in the fighting girls’ faces. They rolled apart, Lnand’s fingers clutching tufts of Gdir’s pale hair. Gdir stood still, too shocked to make a noise. Her scalp felt like it had been ripped off her skull and her hair was filthy with mud, as were her clothes. Her front was sodden.

  But everyone turned to Lnand, who was bleeding.

  Beads of blood had welled where Gdir had scratched her face, running together in the splash. In the shadowy cave, to the excited children, the trickles looked like gouts of blood. Lnand commenced wailing and sobbing as she staggered toward her bedroll, pulling everyone after her.

  When Han couldn’t see her face, she could hear the falsity in her voice. Oh, sure, that scratch had to hurt, but they’d gotten worse slipping on rocks during their stalking games when camping, and no one had peeped (including Lnand) because tears meant instant dismissal back to the castle and the lazaretto.

/>   Han turned her back. Gdir stood where she was, trembling all over. She hadn’t even pushed her muddy hair, tangled as it was, out of her eyes. This was the girl who braided her hair twice a day—at dawn and before bed—because she couldn’t stand mess.

  Gdir said brokenly, between half-suppressed sobs deep in her chest, “She’s even a pug about-about—! Orphan. L-l-like she’s the only—my father. W-w-with the Jarl. Your father, day watch captain of the outer gate. My m-m—” She shut her mouth so hard that Han heard her teeth click.

  Han rubbed her itchy scalp. She hated to think about her mother up on the west tower. Gdir’s mother, as next arms mistress, in charge of the alter watch bow teams. Nobody knew if Gdir’s father, Captain of the Riders, had made it back with the Jarl and the rest of the Riders in time to defend the castle. After watching all those Venn march up the pass, Han didn’t know whether to wish they had or they hadn’t. Since she didn’t know what to think, she’d tried to think only about her orders, and what she would have to report. She didn’t let herself consider to whom she’d be making that report.

  Gdir said in a fierce, low voice, “I have to know. I have to go see. If they’re alive. What if they need help?”

  Han’s body flared with warning. “That’s against orders! We were told to wait until the king comes.”

  “The king isn’t coming, Hadand,” Gdir whispered. “He’s too late. The Venn will get to him first, and they’ll be fighting forever. You saw how many there are! If no one comes for us in a day, I think we should go see ourselves.” Her voice changed, pleading. “Not right out in the open. At night, on the stalk.”

  “No.”

  “You can lead us. You’re good on the stalk.”

  Han wavered, then crossed her arms tight. “No. The Jarlan’s orders were to wait. Ndand’s orders were to wait. We have enough food back there for weeks. So Ndand thought we might have to wait weeks.”