Bradshaw whirled, with his unnatural acrobat’s grace, and was off toward Mace before Kelsea could tell him that she was not busy, far from it, that she had nothing better to do than stare out at the horizon and watch a ghastly destruction play out over and over in her mind. That cloud on the horizon belonged to her. She was the one who had brought it here. She shivered, sensing again the tickling fingers of Lily’s mind, nearly a physical thing, worming its way inside her own. Lily’s life was hurtling toward some calamity, and she needed something from Kelsea, something Kelsea could not see yet. And now Kelsea saw that there was no difference which vision she lived in. Past or future, in either direction lay only terror. She turned back to the horizon and restarted the count of her own mistakes, preparing to suffer through them again, one at a time. Preparing to scourge.
BASTARDS AREN’T WORRIED about us anymore, that’s for sure,” Bermond muttered. “No real sentries out there, just the hawks.”
Hall grunted in agreement, but didn’t look up from his helmet. A sword had grazed his chin two days before, slicing the helmet’s clasp clear off. Hall had rigged a substitute by sewing on an extra piece of leather, but now the fit was imperfect. The helmet kept threatening to slide off his head.
Still, it could have been worse. He would have a scar, but his winter beard would easily cover it. The stupid clasp had probably saved his teeth, if not his life. The clasp seemed like something Hall should have kept, a good-luck charm to carry in his pockets, but it was lost now, perhaps three miles up the Caddell.
“Stop fucking with that thing, Ryan, and have a look.”
With a sigh, Hall dropped his helmet and pulled out his spyglass. He hadn’t slept in three days. The last two weeks had been a blur of pitched battles and retreat as the Mort army pushed them inexorably southwest, across the Crithe and back toward the lower Almont. Sometimes Hall couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or awake anymore, whether the war he fought was real or merely taking place inside his own head. The Mort had taken both banks of the Caddell several days ago, and now the river was crossed with several portable footbridges, ingenious mechanisms that Hall could not help admiring, even while he schemed ways to bring them down. The footbridges allowed the Mort to hold not only both sides of the river but the water itself, to move straight up the riverbed without effectively dividing their forces. The bridges appeared to be made of solid oak, reinforced with steel in the center to keep them from snapping under the army’s weight, but they disassembled quickly for transport. Someone in Mortmesne was a hell of an engineer, and Hall wished he could speak to him for just a few minutes, even now while the world came down around their ears.
Hall’s spyglass caught and held on a flag on the south side of the Caddell. Most of the Mort camp was either black or a deep storm-cloud grey, but this flag was bright scarlet. Hall stood up from his crouch, disregarding the threat of Mort archers, and focused the lens. The red flag was planted on top of a deep crimson tent.
“Sir. Ten o’clock on the south side of the river.”
“What? Oh hell, look at that.” Bermond set down his spyglass and rubbed his temples. He hadn’t slept in days either. Even the blue plume on his helmet, a sign of rank to which Bermond was ridiculously attached, hung limply in the hazy sunlight. “All we need now.”
“Maybe it’s not really her, only a ruse by the Mort.”
“You think it’s a ruse?”
“No,” Hall replied after a moment’s thought. “She’s here, come to finish what she started.”
“Morale’s hanging by a threat already. This might snap it.”
Hall turned his spyglass west, toward New London. The Queen’s refugee camp sprawled in front of the city, a vast acreage of tents and tarps, and now it was a frenzy of activity as Census people evacuated the last occupants into New London. Stone walls ringed the city, a perimeter set just off the edge of the Caddell, some ten feet high. But these walls had been hastily constructed on soft riverbank ground; they would not stand up to assault. Everything was a holding action. One more day to finish the evacuation, and then Bermond would pull the army back to New London, and they would all settle in for siege. A thick cloud of smoke hung over the city; they were slaughtering and roasting all of the animals, curing the meat for the long haul. The army had also been hoarding water, knowing that once the Mort reached the walls, the Caddell would be cut off. Good preparations, but still, a holding action. There was only one way for a siege to end.
“Still, Mort morale might be weak as well,” Bermond mused hopefully. “The Mort like their plunder, lad, and we’ve given them none. I hate to admit it, but the Queen had a good idea with her evacuation. There must be some grumbling going on in their camp by now.”
“Not enough,” Hall replied, and gestured toward the crimson tent. “If they were grumbling, she’d put a stop to it.”
He didn’t want to mention the Red Queen by name. An old superstition from his childhood on the border, where every child knew that if you spoke of the Red Queen, she might appear. Names made a thing real, far more real than that distant spot of scarlet … and yet once his men spotted the tent, Hall knew that the fear would sweep through the remainder of the Tear army like an evil wind.
Bermond sighed. “How do we keep them off for one more day?”
“Pull back. Mass at the entrance to the bridge and build a barricade.”
“They have siege towers.”
“Let them try. We have oil and torches.”
“You’re in fine form today. What did you do, sneak off to Whore’s Alley last night?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I had a dream.”
“A dream,” Bermond repeated, chuckling. “About what?”
“About the Queen,” Hall replied simply. “I dreamed that she lit a great fire that wiped the land clean. The Mort, the Red Queen, the wicked … all of the Tear’s enemies were swept away.”
“Never knew you to be a man for portents, Ryan.”
“I’m not. But all the same, it put me in a good mood.”
“You place far too much faith in a naive child.”
Hall did not reply. Bermond would never see the Queen as anything but an upstart, but Hall saw something else, something he could not quantify.
“They’re coming again,” Bermond muttered. “Put your helmet on. See if you can push them down toward the muddy part of the bank. Their footwork isn’t nearly as fearsome as their steel, and they’ll have trouble on soft ground.”
Hall signaled to the men behind him to get ready. A detachment of Mort had emerged from the camp, spreading out along the north bank of the Caddell. Time and time again they had pushed the Tear back with flanking maneuvers, an easy business with overwhelmingly superior numbers. This would be no different. Hall spared a final glance for the refugee camp behind him, the antlike frenzy of the final stages of the evacuation.
One more day, he thought, then drew his sword and led his men down the knoll toward the river. Bermond remained on the hilltop; his limp didn’t allow him to engage in close combat anymore. Hall’s men caught him up as he ran, surrounding him on both sides, Blaser right beside him. Blaser had taken a nasty wound to the collarbone on the shores of the Crithe, but the medics had stitched it up, and now Blaser was bellowing as they reached the bottom of the hill and ran into the Mort line. Hall felt the impact of an iron sword against his, all the way down his arm, but the pain was muted, as it always was in dreams. He regarded the assailant across from him, slightly bewildered, wondering for a moment what they were actually fighting about. But muscle memory was a powerful thing; Hall heaved the soldier away and sliced downward, finding the join between wrist and glove. The man shrieked as his hand was nearly severed.
“Hawks! Hawks!”