He lay, propped on his elbows, staring at it.
He wanted his mother. By the dead, he wanted his mother. What kind of a thing was that for a man to want?
Beck scrambled up, could hear crashes and bangs everywhere, wails and roars sounding hardly human, downstairs, outside, inside, his head snapping round at every hint of a noise. Were they in the house already? Were they coming for him? All he could do was stand there and sweat. His legs were wet with it. Too wet. He’d pissed himself. Pissed himself like a child and hardly even known ’til it started going cold.
He drew his father’s sword. Felt the weight of it. Should’ve made him feel strong, the way it always had before. But instead it made him feel homesick. Sick for the smelly little room he’d always drawn it in, the brave dreams that had hissed out of the sheath along with it. He could hardly believe he’d wished for this. He edged to the stairs, head turned away, looking out of the corner of one narrowed eye as if not seeing clearly might somehow keep him safe.
The room at the bottom was full of mad movement, shadows and darker shadows and splashes of light through broken shutters, furniture scattered, blades glinting. A regular splintering of wood, someone trying to break their way in. Voices, mangled up and saying nothing, Union words or no words at all. Screams and whimpers.
Two of Flood’s Northern lads were lying on the floor. One was leaking blood everywhere. The other was saying, ‘No, no, no,’ over and over. Colving had this wild, mad look on his chubby face, jabbing at a Union man who’d squeezed in through the door. Reft came out of the shadows and hit him in the back of the helmet with his hatchet, knocked him sprawling on top of Colving, hacked away at his back-plate as he tried to get up, finally found the gap between plate and helmet and put him down with his head hanging off.
‘Keep ’em out!’ Reft screamed, jumping back to the door and heaving it shut with his shoulder.
A Union man burst through the shutters not far from the bottom of the steps. Beck could’ve stabbed him in the back. Probably without even being seen. But he couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if it went wrong. What would happen after he did it. So he didn’t do anything. Brait squealed, spun around to poke at the Union man with his spear, but before he could do it the soldier’s sword thudded into Brait’s shoulder and split him open to his chest. He gave this breathy shriek, waving his spear about while the Union man struggled to rip his sword out of him, blood squirting out black over the pair of ’em.
‘Help!’ roared Stodder at no one, pressed against the wall with a cleaver dangling from one hand. ‘Help!’
Beck didn’t turn and run. He just backed softly up the stairs the way he came, and he hurried to the open cupboard, ripped its single shelf out then ducked into the cobwebby shadows inside. He worked his fingertips into a gap between two planks of the door and he dragged it shut, bent over with his back against the rafters. Pressed into the darkness, in a child’s bad hiding place. Alone with his father’s sword, and his own whimpering breath, and the sounds of his crew being slaughtered downstairs.
Lord Governor Meed gazed imperiously out of the northern window of the common hall with hands clasped behind his back, nodding knowingly at scraps of information as if he understood them, his officers crowding about him and gabbling away like eager goslings around their mother. An apt metaphor, as the man had all the military expertise of a mother goose. Finree lurked at the back of the room, an ugly secret, desperately wanting to know what was going on but desperately not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction of asking, chewing at her nails, silently stewing and turning over various unlikely scenarios for her revenge.
Mostly, though, she was forced to admit, she was annoyed at herself. She saw now it would have been much better if she had pretended to be patient, and charming, and humble just as Hal had wanted, clapped her hands at Meed’s pitiful soldiering and slid into his confidence like a cuckoo into an old pigeon’s nest.
Still, the man was vain enough to haul an overblown portrait of himself around on campaign. It might not be too late to play the wayward lamb, and worm her way into his good graces through simpering contrition. Then, when the opportunity presented, she could stab him in the back from a nice, short distance. She’d stab him one way or another, that was a promise. She could hardly wait to see the look on Meed’s papery old face when she finally…
Aliz let go a snort of laughter. ‘Why, who’s that?’
‘Who’s what?’ Finree glanced out of the eastern window, entirely ignored since the battle was happening to the north. A ragged man had emerged from the woods and was standing on a small outcropping of rock, staring towards the inn, long black hair twitched by the wind. Clearly, he was by no stretch of the imagination a Union soldier.
Finree frowned. Most of the Dogman’s men were supposed to be well behind them, and in any case there was something about this lonely figure that just looked …
‘Captain Hardrick!’ she called. ‘Is he one of the Dogman’s men?’
‘Who?’ Hardrick strolled up beside them. ‘All honesty I couldn’t say …’
The man on the rock lifted something to his mouth and bent his head back. A moment later a long, mournful note echoed out over the empty fields.
Aliz laughed. ‘A horn!’
Finree felt that note right in her stomach, and straight away she knew. She grabbed Hardrick’s arm. ‘Captain, you need to ride to General Jalenhorm and tell him we are under attack.’
‘What? But there’s …’ His gormless grin slowly faded as he looked towards the east.
‘Oh,’ said Aliz. The whole treeline was suddenly alive with men. Wild, they looked, even at this distance. Long-haired, rag-clothed, many half-naked. Now that he stood in the midst of hundreds of others and there was some sense of scale, Finree realised what had puzzled her about the man with the horn. He was a giant, in the truest sense of the word.
Hardrick stared, his mouth hanging open, and Finree dug her fingers into his arm and dragged him towards the door. ‘Now! Find General Jalenhorm. Find my father. Now!’
‘I should have orders…’ His eyes flickered over to Meed, still blithely observing his attack on Osrung, along with all the other officers except for a couple who had drifted over without much urgency to investigate the sound of the horn.
‘Who are they?’ one asked.
Finree had no time to argue her case. She gave vent to the shrillest, longest, most blood-curdling girlish scream she could manage. One of the musicians issued a screeching wrong note, the other played on for a moment before leaving the room in silence, every head snapping towards Finree, except Hardrick’s. She was relieved to see she had shocked him into running for the door.
‘What the hell…’ Meed began.
‘Northmen!’ somebody wailed. ‘To the east!’
‘What Northmen? Whatever are you…’
‘Then everyone was shouting. ‘There! There!’
‘Bloody hell!’
‘Man the walls!’
‘Do we have walls?’
Men out in the fields — drivers, servants, smiths and cooks — were scattering wildly from tents and wagons, back towards the inn. There were already horsemen among them, mounted on shaggy ponies, without stirrups, even, but moving quickly nonetheless. She thought they might have bows, and a moment later arrows clattered against the north wall of the inn. One looped through a window and skittered across the floor. A black, jagged, ill- formed thing, but no less dangerous for that. Someone drew their sword with a faint ring of metal, and soon there were blades flashing out all around the hall.
‘Get some archers on the roof!’
‘Do we have archers?’
‘Get the shutters!’
‘Where is Colonel Brint?’
A folding table squealed in protest as it was dragged in front of one of the windows, papers sliding across the floor.
Finree snatched a look out as two officers struggled to get the rotten shutters closed. A great line of men was surging through the fields towards them, already half way between the trees and the inn and closing rapidly, spreading out as they charged. Torn standards flapped behind them, adorned with bones. At her first rough
