Not one of them, perhaps, had truly understood that the Haestfilke had become like a desert, emptied of its inhabitants. Because relatively few of the dispossessed had managed to reach the capital, it had been easy to believe that the numbers Kivik and the marshals reported were greatly exaggerated. That illusion was difficult to maintain when a slow but steady stream of the hungry and the homeless came straggling down the road.
On this first evening in the foothills, some of the scouts brought another party of ragged women and ill-fed children into camp to speak with the King. They found him seated on a camp stool nursing a sprained wrist, where a blow had fallen during the last skirmish and been deflected by his vambrace. The news they carried with them was particularly grim: several days earlier and some eighty miles to the east, an Eisenlonder army of incalculable size and strength had been seen heading into the mountains, their destination unquestionably the Old Fortress at Tirfang, where Prince Kivik was known to be holed up with his men.
Ristil took care to show nothing of what he was feeling, either to the refugees or to his men; he kept a well-schooled face throughout the recital. But he spoke privately with Prince Ruan afterward. “The road from the east is longer and more difficult than the way we go, yet with such a start I hardly see how they could have failed to arrive at the Old Fortress by now. Meanwhile, we have at least another three days’
ride ahead of us.”
But with the mountains so near, the King instructed his falconers to send out a goshawk, one of Kivik’s own messenger birds, trained to return to the place it had last been released. If the Old Fortress was already under siege, he thought it might help to stiffen their resistance if they knew that help was on the way, and what numbers he was bringing with him.
He watched the goshawk rise into the air, circle in the sky, take its bearings, and go winging off toward the peaks. Then he went back to the campfire and rejoined his captains. “An early night and an early rising,” he announced, as cheerfully as he could.
Nevertheless, he had a sharp misgiving that sleep would elude him this night.
8
With savage glee, the barbarians tore the dead bird apart, strewing the ground with its feathers and blood.
In the sudden silence up on the wall, Skerry materialized beside Kivik. “Let them gloat while they still can,” he said, raising one hand in a fierce gesture. “At least we know our own messages were received, or else why was the bird flying back to us? We know that help is coming.”
“Yes, but how soon—and how many men?”
At that moment, another wave of Eisenlonders came scrambling up the ladders and fought their way past the men at the parapet. Kivik and Skerry both waded in, shouldering a way through the press, hammering blows to right and left. A barbarian took a swipe at the Prince’s head; he flung up his shield just in time and received a jarring blow that he felt all the way up his arm to his shoulder.
The battle raged on. The sun burned like an ember in the grey sky, and sleet continued to fall. It seemed to Kivik that he had been fighting for an eon, for an eternity, yet the sun had progressed only a little past noon. A sudden outcry brought him running back toward the gatehouse, forcing his way with shield and axe.
The giants had created a battering ram out of a tree trunk and two wagons, and were using it against the great double-sided gate. Timbers groaned and iron hinges screeched, but the gate that had never failed in a thousand years held. Kivik arrived on the walkway above the gatehouse just as the ice giants rammed again. He felt the shock through his feet, heard the protest of wood and metal below.
How much longer can it hold? he wondered. Forever, according to the legends, but his faith in the magical impregnability of the fortress was rapidly fading in the face of this determined attack.
He rallied his men, shouting an order to pick up some of the larger stones from the trebuchets and drop them on the giants. As soon as the ram rumbled into action and those who operated it came within range, the stones rained down. Most of them bounced off the giants’ thick hides, doing little harm, but one rock larger than the rest landed directly on a giant’s head and sent him toppling. The men cheered. The Skørnhäär roared and positioned the ram for another rush.
“More stones and bigger,” Kivik called out to those behind him. “And send me some of the archers from the west wall.”
Even in the inner wards, there was no avoiding the tumult and uproar of battle. Some of the refugees made a show of indifference, trying to carry on as usual, observing the rhythms of their everyday lives.
Young children shrieked and played noisy games while their mothers bustled about the kitchen, boiling up cauldrons of very thin porridge, brewing unnourishing soups out of snow, chicken bones, and the occasional beetle or spider for flavoring. The blind man in the pantry amused his grandchildren by deftly constructing slingshots and whittling out wooden tops.
But in other parts of the fortress a sickness was spreading. Already weakened by the dwindling food supplies, many were sinking under the added burden of fear and uncertainty. Or perhaps, thought Winloki, they are finally succumbing to a subtle malignancy in the fortress itself.
Like her fellow healers, she tried to be everywhere at once. By midafternoon, dozens were burning up with fever; others had simply collapsed. She had nothing to give any of them but wormwood and clavender, which she dared not dispense with too liberal a hand, reckoning most of them too frail for a violent purge. In the infirmary casualties came in so quickly that before long there was no place to put them. At Thyra’s suggestion half of the healers moved to an outer courtyard, where they set up tents and cots just inside the second gate. It was there that Winloki spent the next several hours, digging out arrowheads, slapping on poultices made of cobweb, and binding up shattered limbs.
“You ought to take care, Princess,” Syvi admonished her as they worked side by side trying to keep the most desperate cases alive. The more experienced healer was herself pasty-faced and hollow-eyed, yet she knew her limits and had never been known to exceed them. “You don’t eat, you don’t rest—you ought to know the danger in draining too much of your strength. If you collapse or die, what good will you be to any of these men?”
Winloki answered absently, agreeing to eat a bite and take a nap eventually, a promise she had no intention of keeping—or of breaking either, it passed so quickly out of her mind—and went on applying tourniquets, cauterizing wounds, and working spells to stop the flow of blood.
Most of the day had already slipped away before she realized that one man or the other seemed always to be following her, that some familiar faces were turning up again and again as she moved between the tents.
“My cousin has ordered you to guard me!” she accused the boy Haakon as he helped her to lift an unconscious man onto a cot. By this time she was dripping with sweat and bloody to her elbows—she who used to pride herself on the neatness and dispatch of all her healings. “Did you suppose that I wouldn’t notice? I may be distracted, but I’m not yet blind!”
Over by one of the tent poles she spotted a man with a hard, sober face trying to look inconspicuous. If Haakon and Arvi were there, she had little doubt there were other guards lurking in the vicinity. “Truly,”
she said under her breath, but loudly enough that they both might hear her, “it seems there are better things you might be doing!”
The youth blushed and ducked his head. “We do as Prince Kivik bids us, my lady. Your danger may not be immediate, but when and if it is—”