“So, she read it after all,” he said.
Okara whined into the pause between us.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If you want, I’m sure the rebellion--"
“I’ll wait out the winter here, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Where will you go?” I said. “You were with me at Burrow, remember.”
He shrugged, and his shoulders collapsed back to their hunched posture. “The world is bigger than Nayen. There are doctors in Toa Alon, too. If I can smuggle myself aboard a ship, I doubt anyone would think to look for me there. Besides, we doctors tend to blend together, unless one of us is seen in the company of a wanted fugitive.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor Sho,” I said, my voice straining against the lump in my throat. “You tried to warn me away from all of this, years and years ago. I didn’t listen, and in our meeting again I caused you nothing but trouble. I would say I hope we meet for a third time, but I doubt you would appreciate the sentiment.”
He chuckled wryly. “Boy, if we meet again, it’ll most likely be in a dungeon.” He pointed to the north. “Grayfrost is nestled between two peaks, less than a day away as the eagle-hawk flies.” He glanced down at Okara. “What of this one?”
I ruffled the dog’s ears for perhaps the final time. In that moment, I did not see the scheming divine who had lurked in my dreams and drawn me away from the Batir Waste. Only a poor, loyal mountain dog.
“I go on the wing,” I said.
“It’ll do me well to keep a guard dog, I think,” Doctor Sho said. “If you want him back when all this is through, find me in Toa Alon. Try the executioner’s field if you find the dungeon empty.”
“Thank you, Sho,” I said. “And good luck.”
We clasped hands, and I set out into the cold. The sky was clear, save for wispy clouds, long and feathered like the lines of a calligrapher’s brush. I set my heading by the next wake of battle-sorcery. Okara’s long, lonely howl gave me pause before I veered, launched myself into the frigid air, and flew to war.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Grayfrost Keep
Wakes of witchcraft and sorcery crashed through the pattern of the world, stirring all to chaos. As I drew nearer, I felt them more keenly, and more frequently, and hoped that the wake of my veering would be lost in the tumult.
The thin mountain winds led me around one peak and toward another, which rose from distant mist like the back of an ancient beast, furred in forest and armored in stone. A basalt plateau rose from the valley between them, where Grayfrost Keep had been built, its walls flush with the cliffs, its causeway thin and winding. A sea of soldiers--at least ten thousand, by my hasty count--filled a deforested battle-plain around the plateau. Banners fluttered among them. All bore the Emperor’s tetragram, and beneath it another name. One I did not recognize at first. When I had last seen it, the logogram beginning Usher’s name had been for hand, rather than voice.
Corpses littered an empty stretch that spanned an arrow’s reach of the walls. But Grayfrost had suffered in turn. One of its four towers had collapsed, and the others bore the fractal scars of battle-sorcery and the cracks and bruises of chemical grenades. The walls, too, were scored and scorched, and fires raged on the causeway--preventing an assault on the gates but sealing in the fortress’ defenders.
Even as I approached, the swinging arms of siege engines hurled chemical grenades that spilled fire across the walls. Wake after wake of battle-sorcery preceded bolts of raking lightning. At least three sorcerers had come to hunt me among the rebels.
I felt a swell of gratitude that I had never veered while wearing the tetragram, preserving that power for those who wore the Nayeni pact. A well-defended wall could still impede the Empire, so long as it did not crumble.
I folded my wings and dove for the courtyard. Lightning cut the air behind me and filled my nose with the smell of thunder. Then I felt a wake that surprised me, for it did not belong to the canon I knew, though I should have expected it after An-Zabat. I called wind of my own and spun it around me. Spear met shield with a burst of pressure that rolled me in the air. I flared my wings to right myself, and their next attacks splashed against the stone of Grayfrost Keep as my dive took me behind the curtain wall.
I veered back to my human form in the same moment I landed on the frozen, snow-dusted earth of the courtyard. As a wave of cramps washed through me, I stood, and faced a bristling ring of drawn swords and lowered pikes.
I put up my hands to show my naming-scar and witch-marks, and some of the tension went out of the soldiers surrounding me. They were gaunt, their eyes bruised for want of sleep, and dressed in ill-fitting armor, many pieces stained with blood and rust.
“A witch!” one of them said, lowering his sword. “Did one of the messengers make it? Is the Army of the Wolf on its way?”
“I am alone,” I said. “My name is Foolish Cur. Grandson of Broken Limb. Nephew of Harrow Fox--”
The sword came up again, hovered a finger’s width from my throat.
“We know of you,” the soldier said.
“Take me to my uncle,” I said. “I am here to help, in whatever way I can.”
He scowled. “We all know how you helped at Iron Town. Bind his hands. The Sun King will see justice done.”
* * *
The darkness in the hallways of Grayfrost Keep swam with the sputtering light of dying torches. The fortress shook beneath muted explosions and bursts of thunder. Dust cascaded from the bare stone walls.
The soldiers surrounding me kept their distance and their weapons in hand. Their leader--I could not discern a rank, for their armor was mismatched and lacked insignia--led us through a broad hall where once a court must have gathered. No throne stood atop the dais, and the floor was scratched where tables and chairs had been hastily shifted to build barricades. A woman dressed in finer armor than the soldiers who had captured me stood guard at a door in the back of the hall. She regarded me with bright eyes rimmed with red paint.
“Who is this, captain?” the woman said.
“I am--” One of the soldiers cuffed me. I spat blood and resigned myself to silence. I could wait to speak for myself until I met my uncle.
“The traitor Foolish Cur,” the captain said. “He seeks an audience with the Sun King.”
She recoiled from me, and I felt the spike of her will in the world as she reached for witchcraft. After a deep breath she regained her composure, yet she remained a moment’s thought from conjuring flame.
“Wait here,” she said. “I will announce him.”
She opened the door, revealing a wide room dominated by a high map table, where an arrangement of wooden tokens abstracted the battle into something like a game of stones. Of the many men and women who stood around that table, making reports and arguing over plans of action, one drew my eye. An old woman, stooped with age and more deeply wrinkled than I remembered, but unmistakably my grandmother.
The sight of her kindled hope in me, mingled with melancholy.
Beside my grandmother stood a man who could only have been Harrow Fox, though he had changed a great deal in the years since he had come to my father’s estate. The iron scales of his armor fit him well but bore the scars of many a deflected blow. No crown or insignia marked him as claimant to the Sun Throne. The pattern of that room--the way the others gave him space, deferred to his gaze and his furrowed brow--marked him as surely as the tetragram marked a Voice of the Emperor.
The young witch who had guarded the door approached Harrow Fox. She whispered in his ear. The crease in his brow deepened, and his hand reached up to tug a steak of white that shot through his fiery beard from lip to chin.
“We have a visitor,” he said, and the chatter in the room faded to silence.
The captain nudged me forward. I half-stumbled into the room, my hands bound behind my back, and met my uncle’s narrow, measuring gaze.
“I would say well met, nephew,” Harrow Fox said. “But I doubt any meeting between us could be so d
escribed.”
I fell to my knees and pressed my forehead to the floor.
“I must beg your forgiveness,” I said. “I fought with a patrol in the town of Burrow. These legions come hunting me.”
“On your feet,” Harrow Fox said. “We are Nayeni. We do not bow and scrape like the conquerors.”
I rose to my knees, then stood, helped by the rough arm of the soldier who had escorted me. “Again, I beg forgiveness. I was raised among the Sienese and know their ways better than our own.”
“You also think too much of yourself.” Harrow Fox gestured to the maps. “This is not to hunt a single man, but to crush a rebellion. When they have cornered us before, our witches at least could escape to rebuild. Now, those we sent bearing word of this battle were cut down even as they crossed the walls. Not by lightning, but by the wind itself. A new magic the Empire has dredged from their conquests. They have found a way to close our escape, and so have come to finish this long war of skirmishes and retreats with a last, deciding battle.”
“Then for that, too, I must beg forgiveness,” I said. “The Empire stole that magic from the people of An-Zabat, and I played a part in that theft. But in playing my part, I learned the cruelty of the Empire.”
“And you have come here, why?” Harrow Fox said. “To die with us, and so earn absolution?”
“If that is what you ask of me, yes,” I said, and looked past him, seeking my grandmother. She watched with hard eyes. “I was named well, uncle. I have long been a fool. What wisdom I have was hard won, and it tells me that I belong here, that I must make amends for my failures and misdeeds.”
“Better that you had stayed away, I think,” Harrow Fox said. “We are trapped, Foolish Cur. We will die.” He struck the table with his palm, making the wooden markers jump and clatter. “These are not plans to defeat the Sienese, but to make their victory as costly as we can. That is all we can hope for now. To wound them deeply with our death throes.”
The walls shook with the blow of another grenade, and a distant rumbling sounded.
“Even now, another tower falls,” Harrow Fox said. “If you have truly chosen your people over the Empire, then you have chosen too late.”
I felt his words like a blow to the stomach. Again, my foolishness had shaped the pattern of the world for the worse.
“I, too, can command the wind,” I said. “Let me fight them. I might shield you and your witches while you escape. Or at least draw their attention and buy you time.”
“You think you can stand alone against three Hands of the Emperor?” Harrow Fox stroked his beard. “They will tear you apart in the space of a breath.”
“And you will have lost nothing,” I said. “Please, uncle. Let me try.”
“The boy is strong,” my grandmother said. She stepped forward, leaning heavily on a staff of gnarled wood. It had been a decade since I had seen her last. Time and war had not been kind. “When he was only named, and wore no witch-marks, he was sensitive to magic. Enough to wield it, however clumsily. If any among us can hold the Sienese at bay, it is him.”
“You speak as though he is one of us,” Harrow Fox said, crossing his arms. “He is not.”
“Look at his hands,” my grandmother said. “When he bowed, I saw them. He wears his witch-marks still, but not the tetragram. He has chosen and carved himself with his choice.”
Harrow Fox rounded the table and spun me by the shoulder. His calloused fingers turned my wrist.
“He is your sister’s son,” my grandmother said. “And he has been a fool. But a fool can learn what is right. Let him stand between us and the Empire. If he succeeds, we might endure, as we have long endured. If he fails…” she took a deep breath, leaned heavily on her staff. “Then, as he says, we lose nothing. All we sacrifice will be the chance to dig our fangs into the Empire as we die, and all hope of a liberated Nayen will die with us.”
Harrow Fox released me and returned to his place beside the table. He picked up the wooden tokens, one at a time, and set them in their proper places on the map, each with a solid click of wood on stone, muffled by the paper between them.
“Very well,” he said. “Unbind him.”
There was a moment of quiet hesitation before the captain cut my bonds. I rubbed my wrists and shrugged sore shoulders. The soldiers who had escorted me shrank away, as though these small, human movements were the threatening postures of a demon.
“Thank you for your trust, uncle,” I said.
“Do not speak to me of trust. You have not earned it. But my mother is right,” he said, and scattered the wooden tokens with a sweep of his hand. “We will die anyway. This, at least, is a chance to live.”
* * *
Harrow Fox and his cadre of nine witches gathered in the center of the courtyard. Flurries of snow dusted their mismatched armor. They had adorned themselves with fetishes that reminded me of Hissing Cat--feathers, the bones of small mammals, sigils of the creatures they had become in their veering. For luck, perhaps? Or a means to identify corpses blackened by lightning?
Save those who stood the walls and towers to keep the Sienese legions at bay with javelin and bow, Harrow Fox’s paltry army, too, had gathered. He moved among them, pressing hands, clapping shoulders, giving each a few words of courage in the face of death.
At last he came to stand beside me, at the center of that somber congregation. He swept his gaze over them, and, in a voice that rose above the crack of lightning and the thunder of chemical grenades to echo from the hoary walls, he began to speak.
“Many of you have fought long beside me,” he said. “You have wet your blades in Sienese blood. You have seen the tide of battle turn against us and have survived. And you know that though many of us fall and mix our blood with the earth and water of our home, the rebellion must endure.
“I will not promise you that the blood you spill here today might deal the Empire a fatal wound. Nor will I claim that your deaths are necessary. They are not. If we could all take wing and escape this place, we would. It is but an accident of birth, an accident of timing, an accident of divine whim that brings you to your deaths today.”
He held up a finger, met many a frightened eye.
“But that does not make your deaths meaningless. No. You have made yourselves a thorn in the side of the oppressors, when you might have stood aside and accepted the rule of the strong over the weak, when you might have forgotten the names of those who came before you. When you might have forgotten who you are and lived as the Sienese would have us live.
“You will die. But make your deaths costly. Now it is time to twist that thorn. To deal back to them in blood and pain a bare fraction of the suffering they have dealt to us.”
No cheer went up to answer him, but the fear in their faces hardened to determination. Their hands tightened on the hilts of swords and shafts of spears. Poor weapons against a Hand of the Emperor, but capable of wounding, even killing, with a stroke of luck.
“It is time, then,” Harrow Fox said, and touched the shoulder of the young witch who had guarded his door. A quiet understanding passed between them, and with a breath of cinnamon scent the woman became a tawny owl.
“Nephew, let us test this plan of yours,” he said, then, to the rest of his cadre. “If she breaks free, we will follow her. If she does not, we will slit the throat of a Sienese dog for every drop of her blood they spill.”
My time with Hissing Cat may have ended in failure, but as familiarity with brush and ink improves the quality of handwriting, so familiarity with the pattern of the world gave me a finer hand at magic. I felt through the pattern, tracing the walls of Grayfrost Keep and the basalt plateau beneath them, then called the wind and set it to follow that curving line. Only a gentle breeze, but building, gathering snow and dust into a whirling barrier that grew around the fortress, until it caught grenades before they struck the walls and hurled them haphazard into the forest. Until the wind roared around us, louder than any crack of battle-sorcery, drowning out the
imperial trumpets as they blew short bursts of alarm.
The stone maze of the canon hammered at the pattern, and new winds rose against mine. They clawed at the edges of my storm, trying to slow it, or break it, even as it grew. But I knew the wind better than they, and my spell was my own, conjured for this moment, this purpose, not an echo of a distant Emperor’s will.
I pushed the storm higher and higher, till it cut the clouds above. At my signal, the young witch took to the air. She flew a circuit of the fortress walls, and I followed her with my will and shaped a second wind like a desert thermal. It filled her wings and carried her up within the eye of the cyclone. The Sienese felt her wake and hurled wind and lightning, but the storm swallowed both, devouring their spears of wind and scattering their battle-sorcery against the snow and static.
With a final push, I launched the witch over the top of the storm into frigid, thin air, where not even Katiz could have called a wind. Her wake faded as she dove and glided high over Nayen and vanished into the east.
“She is away,” Harrow Fox said, his face slack with disbelief.
While the Sienese could do little to slow my storm, the pattern of the world pushed hard against it. Fatigue dragged at my limbs and brought me to my knees. The storm, too, wanted to collapse and be again the calm, cold winter air.
“Go! The rest of you!” my grandmother shouted. “The boy cannot hold forever!”
I forgot all else but the storm and the thermals, and the need to keep them spinning. The cadre leapt to the sky, one after the other, and rode the magic of An-Zabat to freedom.
“You next, mother,” Harrow Fox said.
“Do you think these poor souls with their swords and spears will manage to deal a single wound alone?” she said. “The moment these winds fall, the Hands of the Emperor will rush this courtyard and spill lightning down every hallway in this fortress. I will stay, and slow them, and give your soldiers a chance to die well.”
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