Simon chuckled. “You’re like my Miri. The queen. She thinks I’m going to go charging up there like when I was a young man—well, in truth I was a mere boy for much of the fighting during the Storm King’s War. I was older when we fought the Thrithings-men. But it’s always fearful, just before. Always.” He shook his head sadly. “How many years do you have, lad?”
“Fifteen years, your Majesty. But my saint’s day is near.”
“Hah. I was much the same age as you when . . . well, when I saw the first of all this sort of thing.” He waved to indicate the hidden enemy, the waiting soldiers. “Not by choice, of course. See, that’s what I was trying to tell you the other day. Do you remember? When I lost my temper and grumbled at you a bit?”
Now Rinan’s gaze was fixed on the king and only the king. “Yes, sire. I remember, sire.”
“It’s because you were singing a song about me, but the song wasn’t really true.” Simon scratched vigorously at his chin. The strap of his helmet had given him an itch, and he wasn’t even wearing it any more. “And the truth is important, because . . . because, well, it just is.” Simon was frustrated: For a moment, he thought he had a grasp on something important, the kind of thing Doctor Morgenes would have said. “You see, lad, there’s the world in songs and stories, and then there’s the world that actually happens to you. And they’re not the same. Even the songs that are about real things—songs that are mostly true, I mean—they’re about people thinking about those things afterward. Do you see what I’m trying to say?”
“I think so, Majesty.”
“Because in a song, someone’s riding off to slay a dragon, and his heart is full of noble ideas and fair maidens that need saving and all that. But in the world that we truly live in, someone rides off to save his own life, and then he’s wandering around and strange things are happening to him that don’t make good sense. And it’s not that he’s going to slay a dragon, it’s that suddenly a dragon is coming at him, and he’s trying not to die. And if he’s lucky—or very good, and I wasn’t that, I promise you, I was very, very lucky—he doesn’t die. And then they make a song about him. Do you see?”
Rinan actually managed to smile. “I do, sire. I believe I do.”
Simon felt relieved. “I’m glad. Because sometimes when I try to explain things to people they look at me like I’m a bit mad, but because I’m the king part of the high king and high queen, they don’t say it.”
“That was a very good explanation, in truth, Your Majesty.”
“I suppose that’s the main thing I was trying to get at, then,” said the king. “What I learned from everything that happened to me. That you don’t ever think you’re in a song, if you know what I mean—”
A sound had begun as Simon was speaking, faint at first, but now rising like a storm wind—people shouting, some actually screaming—and he forgot what he had been saying. Torches moved up the hill, wavering like fireflies as soldiers broke rank and charged up to help the scouts on the hillside above.
Simon turned, hoping to spot Eolair or Kenrick, but could not locate them in the scramble. He knew he had to find trustworthy soldiers quickly so he could get the young harper back to the safety of the camp. Then his horse reared, and Simon had to struggle to hold onto the reins and keep the animal from bolting. When he turned, he found that young Rinan was down on his knees, as if praying. A moment later he saw the terrible shape of an arrow quivering high in the side of the young man’s chest, just under his arm. Then the harper slumped face forward into the black dirt.
“Continue with my armor,” Morgan told his squire. Melkin only stared at him, then glanced toward the massive Erkynguard soldier at the front door as if for permission. That made Morgan angry enough to feel he could spew smoke like an oven. “Why do you look to him? Is he your prince or am I?” He turned to the guard. “Am I permitted to put my armor on, guardsman, in case we are overrun?”
The soldier gave an uncomfortable shrug. He was a bulky, blue-jawed man with eyes so narrow they could scarcely be seen in the shadowed slot of his helmet. “Of course, your Highness, that is sensible. I was told only that you were to stay here, not, God save me, to tell your Highness what to do in your own tent.”
“Stay here, my grandmother says. Stay here!” Morgan waggled his arm until Melkin began buckling on the pieces of his vambrace once more. “Sir Astrian is not staying here. Sir Olveris is not here. Even Porto, that tottering, ancient drunkard, is not expected to stay here with the women.”
“I am not a woman, your Highness,” said Melkin with a certain wavering dignity. “And neither is the guard. It’s just us here.”
“Well, then, we are expected to stay near the women.” Morgan felt curiously light-headed, his stomach empty and his face hot. The thought of the battle he could now dimly hear was truthfully more frightening than exciting, but the idea of everyone knowing that he, the prince, had been kept from it seemed far, far worse. “God’s curse on this, I am a man’s age! I could be doing something!” He whirled to point at the guard, almost knocking Melkin onto his backside. “Those men out there need help!”
The guard stared back at him, and for a moment it seemed he would stay silent. Then he said, slowly and carefully, “They do, your Highness. I’d like to help them myself, and with good fortune I might even do nearly as much as your Highness. With good fortune, as I said.” His words were slow but hard, like the crunch-crunch-crunch of marching feet. “But instead I’m to stay here with you—near the women, as you say—because that is the order my queen gave to me.”
For a moment Morgan felt so hot all over that he could not tell if he was about to laugh or cry or shout until he burst like a bubble. But the disgusted look he thought he saw on the soldier’s face, and Melkin’s cowering posture on the ground, as though Morgan might hit him, made him feel as childish as his sister Lillia at her stubborn worst. More disgrace. He swallowed, then forced himself to swallow again, letting the rest of the angry words drain back into his depths, unspoken. Then, with princely calm belied by tight-clenched fists and palm-scoring nails, he nodded courteously to the guard before sinking onto a stool to make it easier for Melkin to finish dressing him.
Simon’s heart felt pierced, as though the arrow had struck him instead of Rinan. He got down on one knee, fighting the weight of his own armor, and tried to turn the boy over. Another arrow whistled past.
Exposed. God spite me, I’m a damned fool!
He held onto his horse’s reins with one hand and got as firm a grip as he could on the harper’s collar, then grabbed at the back of his belt instead. He dragged the limp, surprisingly heavy body toward the front of the hill and the largest number of his soldiers, trying to let his armored horse serve as protection for both of them. The cries from higher up the hillside had grown in volume and pitch; now the king could hear men screeching in terror and pain. He looked up to see the irregular line of torches run against some invisible wall, many falling away as others continued upward until, having gone a little higher up the slope, they fell too.
How many Norns are on the hilltop? Have we been tricked? Is it some sort of ambush?
As he reached the greatest concentration of his own men, a milling, confused mass of shouting shadows, he found Kenrick the captain marshal standing in his stirrups, trying to form the nearest soldiers into a more orderly troop. Arrows were whizzing past, not in great volume, but with terrible accuracy. A man fell just a few feet from Simon, then Kenrick’s horse shrieked, reared, and toppled with a clash of armor, flattening the undergrowth so that Simon lost sight of Kenrick entirely in the chaos of the horse’s flailing legs and terrified sounds. Men were running both toward the hill and away from it, but far too many soldiers already lay arrow-pierced and limb-tangled on the ground, like dolls strewn by an angry child. Only a few of them were still moving.
“Simon? Simon!”
To his horror, he recognized his wife’s voice. “Miri!” he shouted. “Away! Get back to the camp.” He couldn’t see her, but he could hear that she was far too close. Everything around him seemed to be falling apart. “Back to the camp!”
He had to go and find her, get her out of harm’s way, but he couldn’t leave the wounded harper lying helpless on the ground in the middle of this madness where he might be crushed by one of the horses, many of which were riderless and half-mad with fear. Staring about in desperation, Simon spotted a bit of bright cloth, then saw Jeremias crouching behind a wagon wheel some twenty paces away, his fine clothes in muddy tatters, his hat half-covering his face.
“Help me!” Simon shouted. “Jeremias, help me! It’s young Rinan—he’s been shot!”