“Damn that!” The speaker whirls from her contemplation of the enemy. She stands four fingers over six foot, her build athletic, strong, young with it . . . maybe eighteen. Her armour is gilded, and worked in enamels across it are the burning spears of the Red March. No vanity this though, the steel is full gauge and without ornament. A soldier’s armour. “If we let them bide here the Czar’s path west lies open. The Steppes will be at Vermillion’s gates before the harvest.”
I watch her face, broad and angular, pale for a woman of the March—beneath a shock of dark red hair, angry hazel eyes, full lips. I know this face.
“Contaph.” She advances on the knight beside me. Even a woman of her stature has to look up at the man. “Can we attack? Sally forth? They won’t be expecting an attack.”
An intake of breath at this from the men around her, knight captains and lords by their armour. I can understand this. There are not enough troops within the castle to challenge the host outside. I know this without looking. The castle could not hold so many.
“They won’t be expecting an attack, princess,” says Contaph. “But they are ready for one, even so. Kerwcjz is no fool.”
“A deputation!” This from a man at the wall, with a spyglass to his eye.
The princess leads the nobles to the battlements, archers parting to make space. “Tell me,” she says.
“Ten riders under a white flag. An emissary. And a prisoner. A woman. A girl—”
The princess snatches the spyglass and sets it to her own eye. “Gwen!”
“Kerwcjz has your sister?” Contaph’s fist tightens on the pommel of his sword, the iron plates of his gauntlet grating one against the next. “This means Omera has fallen.”
“Give me your bow,” the princess demands of the nearest archer.
“Alica!” A strained whisper from the man beside her, smaller but similar in his colouring.
“Princess,” she says. The bow is in her hands, her eyes on his—dangerous. “Call me by my name again, cousin, and I will drop you from this wall.”
She pulls an arrow from the archer’s quiver. “It’s a good bow?”
“Y-yes . . . princess.” The archer stutters it out. “Pulls a hair to the left if you over-draw. But that’s not a worry—it’s too much bow for a wo—”
Princess Alica strings the arrow and draws it to her ear, pointing up at the great keep tower back beyond the second wall. “Yes?”
“A hair to the left, your majesty.” The man backs away. “Two fingers on a fifty-yard target.”
“They’ve drawn up.” The cousin at the wall.
The princess lets the bow relax and comes to watch. Nine of the men have spread into a line on their horses. The emissary and the captive ride forward five more yards. The girl is in silks, side-saddle, she looks no more than thirteen, maybe fourteen. The man is fat, his armour adjusted for it, his neck thick and reddened by the Red March sun. He wears a blue plumed helm and a long turquoise cloak.
“Hail, the castle!” His voice reaches them, thinned by the distance.
Princess Alica’s face is stone. She strings the arrow to her bow once more and draws it.
“The flag . . .” Contaph stares at her, a frown throwing his brow into deep furrows. Out among the enemy contingent the white flag flutters.
She looks once, out across the wall. “A mistake,” she says. “It helps me adjust for the wind.” She arches her spine, drawing the bowstring back further across her breastplate . . . and the arrow is gone, just the hiss of it left behind amid our silence.
The princess drops the bow and steps away from the wall. Behind her a high-pitched cry rings out. A pause. The sound of galloping.
“Princess Gwen—” The cousin runs out of words.
“Shot her sister . . .” The whisper ripples along the wall.
Alica whirls back around to face them all. “No negotiation. No surrender. No terms.”
Another sharp turn and she’s striding toward the stairs at the tower’s centre. Contaph jogs, clanking to catch her, the others strung out behind. I’m at her shoulder. So close I can hear the tightness of her breath.
She doesn’t turn her head as Contaph draws level at the head of the stair. “Kerwcjz would have had her staked over a fire for us all to watch by morning. He’d have set her singing my troops a song of pain and kept her at it as long as his torturers’ skills allowed.” The cousin and three others arrive behind us. Alica keeps her shoulders to them. Back at the wall the first rock explodes against the battlements. All along the enemy line engines of war release their pent up forces with throaty twangs.
“We win this, or we die. There is no third way.”
And in that moment I knew my grandmother.
And rock rained down upon us.
ELEVEN
“I’m so hungry.”
“Finally he wakes!” Snorri’s voice close by.
I opened my eyes. “I’ve gone blind!” Panic seized me and I struggled up, banging my head on something hard.
“Relax!” He sounded amused. A big hand pushed me down. The old magic sizzled unpleasantly at the contact points.
“My eyes! My fuc—”
“It’s night time.”
“Where are the damn stars then?” I touched my forehead where I’d bashed it. My fingers came away sticky.
“It’s cloudy.”