And so it went, day after day and night after night. If others would not see the truth, it was up to her to take steps to protect them. While daylight lasted, she gabbled half-remembered charms she had picked up over the years from servants at the Heldenhof. She hunted up bits of charcoal in the fireplaces and fire pits, and used them to scribble runes on thresholds and windowsills. Rüadin for rowan, a specific against witchcraft. Tysa for mint, often used in healing. Tiné. Dair.
“Only it’s no use,” she cried out in a sudden fit of nerves, flinging down her piece of charred wood.
“These aren’t even Wizard’s Runes, just the names of plants.” It was no use. She had only the dimmest idea of what she was doing, that and a natural gift which had never been trained.
Hopeless, she thought, glaring down at her broken fingernails, flexing her thin, charcoal-smudged fingers, hopeless and worthless. What use was it to see, if having seen you could still do nothing? The magical arts had been declining in Skyrra for more than a hundred years, ever since the north severed ties with the south. Even healers were not what they had once been, their gifts steadily diminishing, and the indigenous runestone readers had all but disappeared. So much had been lost, so much knowledge, so much skill, and yet the enemy Eisenlonders kept all their black arts.
Too late, the shadows whispered, in a deep, throaty murmur coming from a place just over her shoulder.
Already too late; they are almost here.
Winloki clapped her hands over her ears, but it did no good. The whispers only continued.
5
The day everything changed began with an excited milling down among the beast-men and Skørnhäär, who had already gathered in numbers much greater than usual outside the gates. Giants trumpeted to each other across the valley. White bears rose up on their haunches and sniffed the air. A snarling and a growling started up, so terrific as to freeze the blood of the men stationed on the outer fortifications.
Then one man with keener eyes than the rest spotted, very small in the distance but still unmistakable, the vanguard of an Eisenlonder army, their bronze armor shining dully in the weak sunlight, their wolf’s-head banners snapping in the wind.
Word spread very swiftly through the fortress. Messengers went running to the barracks, to Kivik’s apartments, and to the armory. Meanwhile, a hum of excitement travelled even faster than the messengers could sprint; before very long the news was being gabbled from person to person among the refugees and camp followers.
Skerry first learned what was afoot when a young guard came tumbling down a stone staircase by one of the gatehouses, almost knocking him over, so eager he was to spread the word: “The enemy has been sighted. They are almost here.”
He helped the youth to right himself, asked a few sharp questions, and sent the boy on. Then he went off with a great swinging stride through successive gateways and yards, then into the keep, arriving at the quarters he shared with Kivik only to discover that his cousin was already gone.
The Prince had been there, only moments before, a bewildered Deor told him, but after issuing a great many rapid orders he had disappeared. Skerry was not yet ready to give up the search. Moreover, he had an idea where Kivik might be found: the same place that he would have gone in his kinsman’s place.
Hastening down a hallway near the infirmary, he met Winloki hurrying along in the opposite direction.
“Something terrible has happened. All day long, I’ve had a presentiment. And the shadows—the shadows have been practically in a frenzy.”
“Nothing has happened that we haven’t been expecting,” he told her soothingly. “The Eisenlonders are coming, but we have no reason to suppose they’ll attack immediately, not after a long march through the mountains. Even when they do, it’s likely to be a long siege.”
Casting a harried look back over her shoulder, Winloki continued on her way, leaving Skerry to go his.
He climbed a spiralling staircase in one of the towers, up to a breezy, roofless chamber at the top that offered an unobstructed view of the entire valley. As he had expected, Kivik was already there at one of the tall windows, watching the forward edge of the Eisenlonder army: a dark mass moving slowly yet inexorably toward the Old Fortress.
An hour later, they had still not seen the end of it. Horsemen and foot soldiers continued to flood into the valley. Those who had already arrived had set up a camp just out of arrow range—and a careful distance from their gigantic allies.
“So many of them. How can there be so many?” Kivik finally spoke in a dull voice. “It seems that for every man we’ve killed this last year a dozen more spring up out of nowhere to take his place.”
Skerry nodded grimly. “Whatever they say back at Lückenbörg, there were never such numbers in all of Eisenlonde. They must be hiring mercenaries; nothing else makes any sense.”
“Mercenaries,” Kivik said bleakly. “Let us say that most of them are mercenaries, for the sake of argument. Then how have the petty lords and chieftains of Eisenlonde found the coin to hire so many?
Are there gold mines in that gods-forsaken part of the world that nobody knew about?” He put his back up against the wall between the windows, folded his arms across his chest. “Or have they rich friends, friends who are somehow, for some unknown reason, our real enemies? Are the barbarians hiring mercenaries, or has someone bought them?”
Skerry struggled to think of a logical answer. Slowly at first, ideas seemingly unrelated began to link up, to grow connections—finally creating a picture that, if it still eluded complete comprehension, at least made a coherent whole.
“Perhaps not enemies of Skyrra,” he said. “Perhaps someone else’s enemies. People in a place where a child was born with such extraordinary gifts, it was decided to spirit her away for her own protection and entrust her to strangers in another country.”
“Winloki.” Kivik caught his breath; then he nodded, one short, sharp movement of his head. “We both know, though it’s supposed to be a great secret, that she’s not truly our kin—nor even likely to be Skyrran, but of southern stock instead. And that ring, the one with the queer symbols that she wears sometimes, it’s no heirloom of our house.”
In truth, there were many strange things about their young cousin-by-adoption: that she was capable of healings even the oldest, most experienced healers could never hope to accomplish; that she had other odd, unpredictable abilities even she did not understand. What they did not know, because they had never been told, were the exact circumstances surrounding her birth.
“But who…” Kivik groped for words. “Who could be powerful enough, ruthless enough, to involve two countries in a bloody and senseless war, all because of a nineteen-year-old girl who doesn’t even know who she is?”
Skerry shook his head. “Someone who does know, only I can’t even hazard a guess who that could be.”
Then his eyes went wide; he felt all of the blood drain out of his face. “Unless—unless it might be someone who keeps half of the world at war. Someone who has been sending out her armies and conquering other kingdoms for longer than either one of us has been alive. And all of it, they say, for mere vanity and greed!”
“Phaôrax?” The very name seemed to darken the air, though it was a name seldom thought or spoken in the north. “But that’s so far away, it’s almost impossible to imagine such a distance.”
It was an immense distance. The island where Ouriána, the self-styled Empress, self-styled goddess, ruled might as well have been on the moon or at the bottom of the sea, it seemed so far removed, so inaccessible. Skerry gave a little mirthless laugh, shaking off the thought. “We are building theories out of sand, snatching fantasies out of the air. It’s too incredible.”