He nearly tripped and broke his leg. The house was mostly dug out of the ground and was accessed by a ladder leading down to a muddy floor. He had not expected that-he’d assumed the floor inside would be level with the ground outside-and he fell into the dugout room, the floor rushing up to meet his face. He managed to twist to the side-he felt his wound open wide as he did so-and crash down into a bin of moldering apples.
There were four people in the room. One was Bethane. Two others were holding her down while she struggled. The fourth held a rusty knife.
Croy rolled out of the bin and drove Ghostcutter straight into the heart of the knife-wielder. Before the others could react, he cut them down, groaning in pain as the wound in his side oozed blood. When they were all dead, he slumped down on the floor and could do nothing but listen to Bethane scream for a long time.
Eventually she stopped. Eventually she came over and lifted his cloak away. His side was clotted with blood. She cleaned his wound and bandaged it. He thanked her as best he could. He could not stand up.
Bethane went over to one of her kidnappers and started pulling furs away from the dead man’s face. Perhaps she wished to know if her attackers had been barbarians or men of Skrae. Croy didn’t have the strength to stop her.
“By the blessed hem of the Lady’s green robe,” the queen said. Croy looked over and saw the face of the thing he’d killed. It belonged to a boy. A child, not much older than Bethane herself. He’d slaughtered a child.
Perhaps it was his wound that kept him from feeling the guilt that honor demanded. He closed his eyes and tried to just breathe. His wound was deep and he feared it might have touched his vitals.
“But what could they have wanted from us?” Bethane asked. “They didn’t ask us for money. I would gladly have given them coin for safe passage.”
Croy didn’t answer. He was afraid he knew, but he couldn’t say it aloud.
It was only when Bethane approached a soup pot on the hearth that he found his voice again. He knew she was hungry-they’d eaten little but mushrooms and tree bark tea for days. The soup smelled divine, hearty and rich and well-spiced. It smelled of good fresh meat.
“Don’t,” he managed to say. “Don’t even look in that pot.”
Did she understand? He couldn’t tell. If he’d had the strength, he’d have made up some story about witch’s cauldrons and the foolish people who tasted their contents. Or about northern peasants being accustomed to a diet that would be too crude for a royal stomach to digest.
“Don’t look,” he said, which was all he could muster.
She stepped back from the pot and came to curl up by his side.
Chapter Eighty-Two
“Nock! Draw! Fire!” Herwig the madam shouted, beating time against her leg with a fan. A row of women loosed their bows, and their long arrows flashed through the air. Most of them at least hit the archery butts at the far side of the square-they’d been practicing nonstop since Malden first recruited them as archers, and Herwig had proved a merciless drill instructor. “Nock!” she called, and the women, all of them harlots from the House of Sighs, lifted arrows to their bows, rested them against their thumbs as they’d been taught. “Draw!” Herwig shouted, and her charges did as they were told, though one very young woman at the end of the row managed to drop her arrow before she’d managed to draw fully. The others laughed at her. Herwig came storming down the row, cold fury in her eyes.
“Is there a problem, Guennie?” she demanded.
“It’s just-I bumped my breast on the draw and it-startled me,” the young whore said, looking down at her feet.
“In the Old Empire they tell stories still of the female warriors of Thune,” Herwig said, raising her nose in the air. “They were fiercer than the men by far. When they encountered this very same problem, they thrust torches to their bosoms to burn off their own left breasts. That,” Herwig said, “made it much easier to draw. Perhaps you’d like to do the same?”
“No, milady,” Guennie said, her eyes very wide.
“Then prove to me you don’t need to,” Herwig said. “Pick up that crooked little thing you call an arrow and draw!”
Slag laughed as the whore archer bent to do as she was told and Herwig rapped her across the neck with her fan. Malden just shook his head.
“Cutbill was right. We should have been doing this weeks ago.” He’d seen real improvement in the last few days, but the female archers were hardly ready-Herwig’s company of archers were the best of the lot. Elody’s women were barely able to string a bow yet. The thieves of the guild more often than not failed to show up for practice at all, though Velmont threatened them with dire punishment.
The thieves and the whores were all Malden had, though. Of the honest population of Ness, by far the great majority of the men were old and infirm or too young to even lift a bow. The honest women were needed elsewhere.
“Will they be ready, when we need them?” Malden asked, mostly to himself.
The dwarf laughed again. “They’ll not be sharpshooters, that’s for fucking sure. But with all those barbarians out there, they’re like to hit one or two if only by mistake,” he pointed out. “Anyone can hit a target as big as an army.”
“Come on,” Malden said. “We’re not helping here-we’re probably just making them nervous so they don’t shoot as straight. Let’s go see how the other work is progressing.”
Malden and Slag hurried north to see to the reinforcement of the Reeve’s Gate. Under Slag’s instructions, the women of Ness used cranes and winches to stack pompions-wicker baskets full of rocks-against the gate, while others hammered a scaffolding of wooden beams together to hold the stacks in place. There was not enough iron available to properly bolster the scaffolding, but a one-legged blacksmith oversaw the construction of a massive bracket that would help a little.
“It won’t be as strong as the wall around it,” Slag said, inspecting the work, “but I’d like to see the battering ram that could get through that.” He seemed very pleased with himself.
A lot of people did that day. For all their fear of Herwig, the archers had been rosy-cheeked and ready at the crack of dawn to get to work. The crews at the gates joked among themselves and sang songs while they toiled.
Everywhere the people of Ness were, for once, happy and productive. Maybe just having something to do was better than huddling in their houses waiting for death to come. Maybe it just helped they couldn’t see over the city wall.
“You’d think the barbarians weren’t out there,” Malden said. He had seen over the wall. He’d seen plenty, and now he couldn’t seem to forget it. Every time he closed his eyes he remembered what he’d seen from the top of Castle Hill. The barbarians had encircled the city and their tents stretched out across the fields as far as the eye could see. Berserkers danced endlessly on the banks of the Skrait, while Morgain and her skull-faced crew rode circles around and around the circumference of Ness, daring each other to come closer and closer to the wall.
So far not a shot had been fired from either side. The barbarians had made no attempt to attack, nor even communicate with the defenders inside the city. Malden knew that would not last. There were very dark days to come.
Yet for the moment Ness was ruled by good cheer. Even the ceaseless flood of petitions and demands on his time as Lord Mayor had slowed to a trickle. The guildmasters of the mercers and the cordwainers both sent him messages of support and confidence. The beggars of the city declared a holiday and threw him an impromptu, if slightly odorous, parade.
“Don’t they understand that we’re all probably going to die, or at the least be enslaved, within the week?”
“Ah, lad, you’re overestimating the faculties of human fucking reason,” Slag told him. “That’s still seven days away. Right now they’re safe and reasonably well fed. And they’re learning something dwarves have always known-if you don’t have time to sit around doing nothing, you don’t have time to fucking complain.”
It was true. There was so much to be done that Malden had found employment for every idle hand. Wooden
