Kingdom River

reported by little ice-boats hissing along fast as birds. But a battle scattered over miles and miles of river ice, so only faint formations – looking, it seemed to Martha, like spilled ground pepper on a glittering field – appeared and disappeared, and left no trace. Except once, when the Mischief, rumbling along fast as a fast horse could gallop, its great skates leaving plumes of ice-powder behind, sliced its way over sheets of frozen blood and frosted slaughtered Kipchak men and horses that crunched and thumped beneath the ship's blades as its tons sailed over them.

'Well done!' the Queen had shouted, and danced on the narrow poop. She'd hit Captain Dearborn on the arm with her fist. 'Well fucking done!' as if the Mischief had killed those horse-riders.

The captain had said, 'So far, ma'am, matters do seem to go our way.' He appeared to be a cautious man.

Too cautious. By the next morning, the Queen had noticed.

Martha followed her up from breakfast – oat cakes and hot apple juice brought to the captain's cabin. The main deck was ice-slippery, but the Queen, wrapped in a lynx cloak, a slender circlet of gold at her brow, stomped over it sure-footed, past coiled lines and awkward devices. Ship's officers bowed as she went past; crewmen stood aside. She climbed the narrow ladder up through the poop-deck's railing, to where the captain was standing, observing the set of the sails.

'Captain…' The frost clouding from Queen Joan's breath seemed like smoke from a story dragon's.

'Ma'am?'

'Don't you 'ma'am' me! I want to know what messages, what orders you and your yellow dogs have been passing back and forth to those packets. Have you – have you dared to keep me back from my soldiers? Keep this fucking boat – ship, whatever – back from the fighting?'

'I do… I do as I'm ordered, Your Majesty.' Martha thought Captain Dearborn looked pale. The Mischief hit a low ice-reef, and he had to reach to the rail for balance, but the Queen stood as if she were nailed to the deck.

'Give me a better answer,' she said, no longer shouting, and put her hand on her knife.

'It was felt… Admiral Hopkins feels that Your Majesty, while viewing aspects of – '

'I'm losing patience,' the Queen said, in a very pleasant way.

'He felt… you should not be put in danger.'

'And ordered so?'

'Yes, ma'am – Your Majesty. Lord Monroe had also asked special care for you.'

Then the story dragon was on the poop, roaring, and a steel fang out and brandished. Martha stepped away. The captain clutched the rail.

Below, the Mischief's main deck seemed frozen as the river, and all the men stood as still, until slowly… slowly the Queen grew calm and quiet, took a deep breath, and sheathed her knife.

'Now you listen to me,' she said to Captain Dearborn. 'You turn this fucking boat in whatever direction is needful to get to my soldiers – and my brave sailors – who are fighting.'

'Yes, ma'am. As you command.' Captain Dearborn ran down the poop's steep ladder quickly as a boy, shouting orders as he went, so sailors raced to do this or that, and climbed to shift the sails… It seemed to Martha as if the ship, that had been drowsing, now sprang awake. The Mischief leaned and leaned with its swollen canvas, until the great port-side steering skate lifted from the frozen river. And in a long, curving reach, the great ship took course to the northwest, running angled to the wind.

It was the fastest that Martha had gone anywhere.

And remained the fastest into a sunny middle of the day. The Queen, leaning on the port rail, was eating a cold sausage and one of the ship's brittle biscuits – Martha had already finished hers – when the lookout called, 'Deck there! More dead'ns!' And a moment later: 'Nothin' she can't run over.'

The Mischief skated from perfect ice, bright as snow-dusted mirrors, onto a field of the dead… its massive blades cracking shallow sheets of frozen blood, rumbling, jolting first over heaps of fallen fur-cloaked men, and horses – then one… then another rank of East-bank infantry slain, their burnished green armor beautiful in sunshine. This armor bent and broke as the ship sped over.

The Queen stared out over the rail. 'My boys,' she said – then turned and called, 'Stop! Stop! One moved! Captain, stop, there are wounded there still alive!'

'No, ma'am,' Dearborn said. 'We cannot. Those men are frozen already – stuck hard in blood and ice. We'd be hours getting any aboard, and very few to live.'

'My boys… my boys.' The Queen was weeping, tears odd down a furious face. 'Del…' she said, a name Martha didn't know.

The Mischief, which knew no regrets, no losses, sailed on over the dead and dying at great speed, only shrugging where they'd fallen thick.

Though no officer, no sailor, said so, there was relief as the ship left that field, and sketched its way again over ice bare of anything.

The Queen turned from the rail, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. 'Martha, we'll go below, and you'll arm me.'

'Majesty,' Dearborn said, 'I swear not necessary!'

'Then,' the Queen said, 'I will be disappointed.'

… They ran and ran into afternoon, the sails handled for the wind, and saw dead here and there. The Queen, cloaked in her lynx, the ends of a blood-red scarf flowing with the wind, stood on the Mischief's high poop full-armed in mail, leather, and boots, her light steel helmet hanging by its laces down her back. She watched near the scorpions with two assags in her hand, her long Trapper knife at her belt. And though standing at the ship's stern, she seemed a figurehead of war.

They heard the battle before the raven's-nest saw it. There was a sound as if distant different songs, sung by many people, were echoing over the ice.

Dearborn called an order, and sailors climbed fast to set a triangular canvas. 'Staysail,' he said to Martha as they watched the sailors work above them, the winter sun blazing over their shoulders.

'Ship!' the lookout called, and as they sailed into those battle sounds – coming clearer, harsher now on a bitter wind – a ship appeared on the ice horizon. Mischief approached fast off what Martha had learned was starboard, and soon they could see that the ship was not a ship any longer. Once, judging from the massive side-skates and smaller steering blades still boomed out for a turn, it had been Mischief's size. Now it lay burned to the ice, stuck in a lake melted by fire then frozen again, its charred timbers and charcoaled masts absolutely black against a world so white. Many smaller things, the size of persons, had burned with the ship. And others, dead men and dead horses, unburned, sprinkled the ice around it.

First Officer Neal stared as they passed. 'It's the Chancy.'

'Perhaps not, Jim,' the captain said.

'I know the ship. Steer-skates always rigged elbow off the beams…' Neal turned away and went down the ladder to the main deck.

'Has a brother on her,' Dearborn said. '… Had a brother on her. Younger brother.'

Now, as if the burned Chancy had been an introduction, they could see the battle.

It stretched, like a great shifting black-and-gray serpent, as far as could be seen from the Mischief's decks. More than a mile… almost two miles away, huge rectangles of bannered infantry in East-bank's green armor formed and reformed on the ice – nine, ten of them, and each, it seemed to Martha, made of maybe a thousand men. These formations stood offset, some slowly turning, wheeling ponderous as barges – but barges in a flood of horsemen that shifted and flowed about them as if to wear their ranks away as fast water wore stone. The distant infantry seemed coated by a sort of glittering fur, that Martha thought must be bristling pikes – and long, swift shadows fleeted away from them over the ice.

'What are the shadows?' Martha said.

'Bolts volleyed from their crossbows.' The Queen set one of her assags against the rail, and stretched to ease