He started running down the street, but he couldn’t take his hand away from the thing in his neck, any more than he could wrap his mind around what had really happened to him.
I’ll be fine, he thought. It must have missed my veins. I’ll be fine. I’ll just get old Horsecutter to take it out. He’ll sew the wound. I’ll be fine.
Something thumped onto the street behind him. He turned to see a man-shaped shadow.
It started toward him.
He ran.
He could feel the pulse in his neck now and something clotting in his throat. He vomited, and that brought agony that sheeted down the whole left side of his body. He stumbled a few more steps.
Saints, please, leave me be, I’ll never talk, he tried to say, but his voice was pinned inside of him by the dagger.
Then something cold punched into his back. He thought it was three times, but maybe it was four. The final touch was faint, like a kiss, and right at the base of his skull.
“Sleep tight, boy,” he heard someone say. It sounded like a saint, which made him feel a little better.
3
The Squire
Night-winged clouds rubbed away the moon, and a freezing sea wind bittered the darkness. Neil had almost no feeling in his toes or fingers. He could smell nothing but brine and hear nothing but the wind and waves savaging the shore. But he could imagine much more: the breath of the foe, somewhere out there in the night. The clash of steel that would greet the dawn. The droning dirge of the cold, restless draugs beneath the waves, dead yet alive, shark-toothed mouths gaping in anticipation of the meat of the living. Of Neil MeqVren’s meat.
“Dawn’s almost here,” his father murmured, lowering himself to lie next to Neil on the sand. “Be ready.”
“They might be anywhere,” someone else said. Neil thought it was probably Uncle Odcher.
“No. There are only two places they could have put their ships in. Here, or on the Milkstrand. We’re here. They must be there.”
“They say the Weihands can march at night. That they can see in the dark, like the trolls they worship.”
“They can’t march at night any better than we can,” Neil’s father said. “If they aren’t on their ships, they’re doing exactly what we’re doing—waiting for the sun.”
“I don’t care what they can do,” another voice muttered. “They never reckoned on meeting the men of clan MeqVren.”
What’s left of us, Neil thought. He had counted twelve, last time the sun went down. Twelve. The morning before, they had been thirty.
He was rubbing his hands to try to warm them when a fist closed over his fingers. “You ready, son?” his father whispered.
“Yeah, Fah.” He couldn’t see his face, but what he heard in the voice made his scalp prickle.
“I shouldn’t have brought you on this one.”
“I been to war before, Fah.”
“Yes. And proud I’ve been of you. No MeqVren—nor no man of no clan I’ve ever heard tell of—ever killed his first foe when he had only eleven winters, and that’s been a year gone for you, now. But this—”
“We going to lose, Fah? We going to die?”
“If that’s the way the saints want it, damn them.” He cleared his throat and sang, very softly,
Neil shivered, for that was part of the MeqVren death-chant.
But his father clapped him on the arm. “I don’t intend for us to die, lad. We’ll catch ’em off guard.”
“Then the lord baron will pay us a pretty penny, eh, Fah?”
“It’s his war. He’s a man of his word. Now let’s be still, for here comes the dawn.”
The sky lightened. The twelve men of the MeqVren clan crouched behind the dune, motionless. Neil wondered what the baron or the Weihands might want with this wretched island anyway, with it so rocky and hard it wouldn’t support even sheep. He turned to look back at the sea. The sky had lightened enough so he could make out the prow of their longship, a horse-head silhouette.
And down the beach, another. And another.
But the MeqVrens had only one ship.
He tugged at his father’s sleeve.
“Fah—”
That’s when something hissed along and thumped into his father’s back, and his father sighed strangely. That’s when the shouting started, and the MeqVrens rose to their feet in a shower of arrows, to face three times their number coming up the strand. Neil closed his eyes, then jumped up with the rest of them, his hands too cold to feel his spear, but he could see it, clutched in his hands.
Then an arrow hit him. It made the same sound as the one that had hit his father, just a little higher in pitch.
Neil jerked awake and found himself clutching his chest, two fingers below his heart, breathing as if he had just run a league. He felt like he was falling.
Where am I?
The confusion lasted only a few heartbeats, as he recognized the rocking of a ship, the furnishings of his cabin. His breathing slowed, and he felt the small puckered scar.
Eight years, but in his dreams it hadn’t faded at all.
Eight years.
He sat there a few more minutes, listening to the sailors on the deck above. Rather than trust himself to sleep again, he rose to shave. He wanted to look his best today.
He stropped his razor and brought its keen edge to his cheek, then down the square lines of his chin, whisking off the stubble with sure, steady motions. He finished without a single scratch, and with the same blade he trimmed his wheat-colored hair well away from his eyes.
The Black Mary of that day on the beach faded, and his excitement grew. Today! Today he would see Thornrath!
He splashed water on his face, blinked it from his blue eyes, and went above decks.
They reached the Cape of Rovy by midafternoon and sailed with the alabaster cliffs on their left hand for another bell. There, clearing the headland, they turned into Foambreaker Bay, a wide haven in the shape of a moon two-thirds full, circumscribed on the north by the Cape of Rovy and on the south by the Craigs-Above-Ale. West was the open sea, and east, where Saltspear’s prow now pointed, stood a marvel so awesome Neil thought his heart would crack. He almost welcomed it, if he could die with this much wonder on him.
“Saints of Sea and Thunder,” he managed weakly.
His earnest thanksgiving was all but swept off by the wind buffeting the deck of the Saltspear, but the old man who stood beside him, Fail de Liery, heard and bit a fierce grin into the westerly. Hair streaming behind him like a banner of smoke, Fail glanced over at Neil, and though his face was pitted, scarred, and wrinkled by threescore years of life, he still seemed somehow youthful when he chuckled.
“There she is, lad,” the elder said. “That’s Thornrath. Does she measure up?”
Neil nodded his head dumbly as the cape dropped farther behind them. The eastern sky behind Thornrath was as black as coal smut, and above that darkest lens piled curtains of spume-gray clouds that broke at the meridian. But from the clear western sky, the sinking sun slanted golden light to blaze the bay and the mightiest fortress in the world against that storm-painted canvas.
“Thornrath,” he repeated. “I mean I’d heard—you’d told me—” He paused to try to understand what he was actually seeing, to understand the size.
If Foambreaker Bay was a moon two-thirds full, the entire eastern third of it—perhaps four leagues—was a wall the hue of ivory. Seven great towers of the same stone jabbed at the sky, the centermost rising to such a high sharp point it was dizzying.
As Neil watched, a man-o’-war sailed through one of six arched openings in the wall. He reckoned its masts at more than twenty yards high, and they were in no danger of touching the top of the arch. And the arch was only half as high as the wall.