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February 20 - February 23, 2024
He put the packages in a room in his memory palace, and he carefully walled that room off from his consciousness. He twinned off a second self to remain in the room. The second self opened the first package. A third self stood ready with an axe. The phantasm was heartbreakingly beautiful. Thorn had been a great magus, of course. Harmodius allowed his second self to subsume himself in the complexities of the working. He shut down the room, withdrew his second self, and sat in another created room in his memory palace, a comfortable room with a circle of armchairs. His second self sat in
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The captain had seen archers in action before, had watched his men practise at the butts, but he’d never watched a dozen professionals at full stretch.
The first stone was loaded with some trepidation. The arm of the trebuchet would throw a man in armour five hundred paces. A war horse three hundred paces.
Wilful fussed like a mother sending her child to church the first time.
“Surely it is a crime against both the King and Church to trade mirrors to the irks.” The old archer grinned. “It’s a crime to shoot Lord Edward’s deer. It’s a crime to take rabbits in his warrens. It’s a crime to leave my steading without his leave.” The archer shrugged. “I live a life of crime, m’lord. Most low-born do.”
The captain nodded. “You all know Tom would come to get you. Let’s go get Tom.”
The two things came at them, and their fear… Wasn’t as strong as it had been. Somewhere deep inside, or perhaps above, the fight, the captain had time to smile at the irony. He had lived his entire childhood in fear. He was afraid of so many things. Familiarity breeds contempt. He was used to acting while he was afraid.
This is going to change the world.” “I like the world fine as it is,” Tom said from the doorway. “When you two man-witches are done having your bloody rites, sacrificing babes and eating them or whatever heathen thing you do, I’m ready with the day’s muster.”
The Magus was trying to put the tapestry back over the opening. For a man of such power, he was curiously inept at the task.
Tom caught his arm. “You can’t be thinkin’ we can take him with steel.” The captain lowered his voice. “No, Tom. I don’t think so, but I’m going to try, anyway.” Tom nodded. “So we’re the bait, then?” The captain looked grim. “You are a little too quick, my friend.” Tom nodded. “When there’s death in the air, I can see through a brick wall.”
But now it was down to him, and he didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to weaken himself by taking on the fortress directly. He didn’t want to expose himself to direct assaults from his apprentice and the dark sun. However puny, they were not unskilled or incapable. He didn’t want to fight with her. Although his reason told him that when he killed her, he would be much stronger for it. His link to her was a link to his past life. A weakness. He didn’t want to do this at all. Because win or lose, he’d engaged forces that forced his hand. Made him grow in power. In visibility.
She grabbed his bridle, and his great war horse—quick as lightning—bit at her hand, and only his instant reaction saved her. The Red Knight slapped his hand at Grendel’s neck, and the war horse took one step, and tossed his head, as if to say “could have, if I really wanted.”
Off to the south, at the entry to the defended path which the archers had taken and retaken every day of the siege, waited a company of daemons. At least forty of them, enough to exterminate his company of knights. He grinned. I didn’t go that way, he thought, smugly. The creatures of the Wild were not as clever as men at hiding themselves in the Aether. It occurred to him as he cantered down the steep road that they didn’t think of hiding in what—to them—was their natural element. Or something.
It was like a man, but it was not like a man. He was some odd fusion of man and Wild. He might have pitied it, but he hated it, as well—because its fusion was different from his.
Bad Tom roared, “Eat me, you son of a bitch!” at his side and was gone into the green-tinged darkness. Tom was a legend for temper, for ill manners, for lechery and crime. But to see him on a fire-lit battlefield was to see war brought to earth in a single avatar, and as his knights swept past him, the captain watched as Tom’s lance, unshivered, swept through the trolls. “Lachlan for Aa!” he roared.
You dared to oppose me. Do you know who I am? Deep in the grip of the horror, the captain writhed. His conscious, rational mind registered that only the most unstable beings asked such questions.
You are ours. Not theirs. The captain laughed, a laugh he treasured. “There is no us, Thorn. In the Wild, there is only the law of the forest and the rule of the strongest. And if I join you, I will subsume you to my needs.” Just to make his point, the captain projected, as his mother had taught him, the imperative. Kneel.
Peter didn’t recover so much as grow used to what was gone, like a man who has lost a hand, or an arm. And it took days, not hours.
And more creatures slept cold in the woods, or slept in streams, or mud.
He was at the top of the stairs. “Obey. On your life.”
“I am whatever I choose to be,” said the captain. “So are you. What do you choose?”
Lady Almspend sat a little too suddenly. “He—gave me the most wonderful book,” she said haltingly. The other ladies laughed, but not unkindly. “Was it a big book?” one asked. “Very old?” asked another. “Perhaps more like a nice, thick scroll?” suggested Lady Mary.
Ranald shrugged, but he couldn’t stop looking into her eyes. “Lady, I could say I’m no knight, but a drover. And I could say I’m a hillman, and not in any way your subject.” He grinned, and knelt. “But he’d be a rude bastard and no kind of a man, who ever failed to acknowledge you as his Queen.”
Favor; Bad Tom caught Mag’s Sukey around the waist and she, a widow of twenty-four hours, squealed like a girl;
Thorn could hear the music. It drew him the way a candleflame will draw insects and frogs on a still summer night in the deep woods. He walked heavily to the edge of the woods, and listened with his keen senses to the sounds of people laughing and dancing, to the sounds of as many as ten instruments. He listened, and listened. And hated.
He wasn’t much of a conversationalist—mostly he spoke to the hawks, murmuring to them in much the same language that Random’s daughters spoke to their dolls.
But at another level, he walled all that away. Can you fight every day? He knew he could. Every day, until the sun died.
He put his head down and tried to seal off his mind from his thighs and his lungs, and he ran.
He had made mistakes, but the end game was going to play out with the inevitability of one of those ancient plays he had once so enjoyed, and now could no longer remember.
He watched them run, and knew—with the pain of intimate and exact intellect—that his entire plan for the day would come apart.
“In the dark? Through a host of enemies?” Gelfred smiled. “I can with God’s help. And by my faith, messire, if you make a crack about God not caring, you can take your cursed message yourself.” The captain got to his feet and gave the huntsman his hand. “I am rebuked, Gelfred.” Gelfred shrugged. “Join me in prayer,” he said. “Let’s not get carried away,” the captain replied. Gelfred laughed. “Why do I like you so much?” he asked. The captain shrugged. “The feeling is mutual.”
He pressed through the woods, and the woods parted before him. There is nothing in the woods that can impede a man in full harness—no branch, no trailing vine, no bank of thickset canes, no matter how thorny, will stop a man in armour. Or slow him.
so he waited a heartbeat, stepped from behind his tree and put a shaft under the arm of somebody’s fucking lord and turned, and ran again.
The next one he caught fell to his knees and begged for mercy. He was perhaps fourteen years old. Hawthor paused, and an older guardsman beheaded the boy. “Nits make lice,” he said, as he swept by, and Hawthor hardened his heart and ran on.
boats. A handful of knights from the vanguard tried to stop them, and the Jacks just ran around them—exhausted men without armour have an advantage over exhausted men in armour.
Sighing for the loss, he tested the binding of power on Mag’s cap. He cast, as Harmodius had taught him, guided by Amicia’s sure hand on his—three workings, each contingent on the other, like nested equations on the chalkboard. The loosing, the binding for power, the healing. He used what was left of the life force he had taken from the boglin chief.
He sagged away from her. Spat the taste of bile into the water, and fell to his knees. She made a sound and her eyes rolled up. Michael caught his shoulder, and put a canteen in his fist. He drank. There was wine in the canteen, mixed with the water, and he spat it out, then drank more. “Get me up,” he said. Red Beard got under his other shoulder. “You’re a warlock?” he asked brusquely. The captain had to laugh. “I’ll forgive you your imprecise terminology.”
Gaston wanted to go home to Galle, sit in the chair of judgment of his castle, and pontificate on which wine was the best at harvest time. He thought back to the peasants under the bridge, his heart now full of understanding. He vowed—would God accept such a vow?—to go home and beg Constance for her hand in marriage.
He felt a ripple of power—identified it, and cursed again. Both the dark sun and his former apprentice had survived. He acknowledged his own hubris in imagining them dealt with. It was the very curse of his existence. Why did he constantly think things would go his way? Because they should.
The pain was so great that de Vrailly could barely register thoughts—and yet, he was in an ecstasy of relief to be atoning for sin with every waning beat of his heart. The massive damage to his side—the great puncture wounds that sucked air and spat blood and bile with every breath—were living penance, the very stuff of chivalric legend. He would go pure to his Saviour.
“There is a subtle philosophical difference between killing and letting die,”
He bent low, and stripped the bright steel gauntlet off his hand—a slim, ungendered hand—and ran it along the knight’s body. That touch struck de Vrailly like the shock of taking his first wound—and lo, he was healed. He took a deep and shuddering breath, and found no pain at the bottom of it. “You cannot just heal me,” de Vrailly snapped. “It would be unchivalrous of me to walk away healed when my brave people lie at the edge of cruel death.” The archangel turned his head, brushed the long hair back from his forehead, and he stood. “You are the most demanding mortal I have ever met,” he said.
The captain looked at the Prior. “Messire, you are so much my senior—in years, in experience, and in this place—guide me. Or command me.” The Prior let his horse put his head down to munch grass around the heavy bit. “Oh, no, you don’t. You have led this force to this point—you think I’m going to change commanders now?”
Tom was watching the oncoming line. “You know we have to charge that line,” he said. “If we charge the line, we should buy—hmm—ten minutes or so.” He was wearing a grin that made him look like a small boy. “A hundred knights—ten thousand boglins—and trolls, and daemons, irks…” He looked at his captain. “You know we have to.” The Prior looked at Tom, and then back at the captain. “Is he always like this?” he asked. “Pretty much,” the captain said to the older man. “Will you come? I’m not at all sure any of us will come back.” The Prior shrugged. “You are lucky,” he said. “And luck is better
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He made it to the base of the main cellar ramp—where he could hear a pair of archers on duty. He prayed… and God showed him the way. Whoever had come up into the cellar had left a door open. He dragged himself to the portal, and looked down. Scrambled and found a lantern with a candle and a tinderbox. It was God’s will.
The captain leaned forward into his lance. For a few glorious heartbeats, it was the way he had imagined, when he was a small boy dreaming of glory.
He was the wind, and the roar of the hooves, and the tip of the spear.
The captain swung from the shoulder, nipped both arms off an enemy on the foreswing like a farmer pruning vines, leaned well forward using his stirrups for balance, and cut back into another creature’s head, clearing his front, and George—somewhere in the combat, the captain had named his horse George—backed a few paces.
Daniel Favor, former wagoner, climbed over the edge of the trench, to stand on the grass in the wind. Around him, farmers from the villages around Lissen Carack looked at him, and knew they could not let him be a better man.
Adrian Pargeter climbed out of the safe trench, and put his crossbow on the ground to draw his sword. Older guildsmen looked at each other. A draper with a grey beard asked his lifelong business rival—we really doing this?—and then they were up the vitrified earth too, drawing their swords.
