Authors: Nathan Hawke
T
rouble always came in threes. The first trouble was the trouble Valaric had expected: Sixfingers had left Tarkhun and come to the valley with his army of forkbeards. Well, that was the way it was supposed to be and the Wolf had known this day would come ever since his Crackmarsh men had slipped away from the Reach and helped themselves to Varyxhun instead. That had been a slap in Sixfingers’ face and a taunt too:
The Widowmaker never took this castle. Can you?
Valaric had been preparing for the siege since the day he’d arrived. If was honest with himself, he was itching for it.
He sighed. There was always someone in the shrine to Modris up at the top of the castle – Sarvic or Angry Jonnic or one of the others quietly praying for the Vathen and the forkbeards to fight to a bloody stalemate. Valaric hadn’t bothered. He’d been at war with the forkbeards for more years than he had fingers and that was never how it went. The Lhosir were charmed. Luck never sent a plague to make their armies vanish into smoke or made the rivers flood and wash them away. The best luck he’d ever had was a bit of mud that made a forkbeard shield wall back up a hill a bit more slowly for fear of slipping, and what the mud had given, the rain that made it had taken away with what it had done to the Marroc archers. It hadn’t surprised him when he’d heard that Sixfingers was in Witches’ Reach, that he’d turned his back on the Vathen and chosen to crack
Varyxhun first. No surprise that his iron devils had come with him either. Could have done without the shadewalkers. Even the whisper of them put the shits up his men. The Aulian would deal with them though. His men needed to see that.
He stared at himself in the mirror – another Aulian treasure left behind when they’d abandoned the valley to the Marroc warlords who’d claimed the castle until the first kings of Sithhun had tamed them. It was gold and a finer silver than you ever saw in Andhun. Every time he looked at it, he felt a warmth inside him, a reminder of who he was and why he was here, for not long ago a Lhosir had sat where Valaric sat now. Braiding his forked beard, no doubt.
The Aulians had left other things too. Like a great big cave right behind the sixth and last gate to the castle with great big bars across its mouth and, if you believed the stories, a great big dragon inside which would drown anyone who broke those gates down if you could somehow find a way to wake it up.
He sighed. Stories like that kept his men happy but stories didn’t kill forkbeards. The Aulians had left behind a library too – the biggest on this side of the mountains. Not that Valaric cared, but Oribas spent half his time there and the other half wandering the castle, looking and poking, although what he was looking and poking
for
only the gods knew. So far all he’d managed to do was find some underground pools and get soaking wet. Books. Books wouldn’t save them from Sixfingers any more than stories. Was it too much to hope that Oribas would find some other treasure, something he could actually use?
An angry fist banged on the door. Valaric glanced out the window at the sun and yes, it was about time. His second trouble was more straightforward on account of being locked up in the castle prison, but doing that had made his third. He took a deep breath. Stared at himself in the mirror
and sighed again and then turned to face the door. At least it had a latch on the inside so she couldn’t just barge in. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘And still no, and I’ll have some more no for you later. Now go away!’
‘It’s not right, Valaric, and you know it.’
‘He killed a Marroc, Arda Smithswife.’
He waited to see if there’d be more today but after a pause he heard her walk away. Maybe she was giving up. And then he looked at himself in the mirror again and laughed.
Arda Smithswife? Give up?
Five minutes later he was breaking his fast with the Marroc who’d lead the defence of the castle: Achista and Addic of Witches’ Reach, who spoke for the Marroc of the valley; Sarvic and the two Jonnics, who’d come with him from the Crackmarsh; and the Aulian, whom everyone said was a wizard, dragged away from his books. They’d all fought the forkbeards before but he always got the same feeling whenever he sat with them: they were too young. They were brave and they’d fight and they’d stand on the walls of Varyxhun until someone cut their legs from under them, but they barely even remembered the days when the Screambreaker had rampaged. Except for Sarvic and Angry Jonnic, who’d been with him at Lostring Hill, none of them even knew what a real battle looked like.
‘Sixfingers is moving up the valley now,’ said Achista. Her men were watching them come. ‘He’ll be in Varyxhun tomorrow with five hundred men.’ She didn’t say anything about the iron devils but all the Marroc except for Valaric made the sign of Modris anyway. Valaric didn’t bother because Modris wasn’t going to help them, not this time. He closed his eyes. No point banging the table.
‘As many men as we can spare. Get them down into the city and sweep it one last time. Food, arrows, weapons, oils, anything that burns.’ He glanced at Oribas. ‘Salt. If there’s anyone still left they can keep whatever they can carry but
nothing else. Forkbeards will just take it anyway. Make sure they understand – the gates close when Sixfingers comes and they don’t open again for anyone. Anyone.’ Felt like he was plundering his own people. He knew he was right – whatever he left he was leaving for Sixfingers – but that didn’t make it any easier to do. ‘Might be shadewalkers in the city tonight.’ He glanced at Oribas while the others all quietly made the sign of Modris again. ‘Salt. Do you have enough?’
‘Enough to fight them, yes. Enough to bar them from the whole city?’ Oribas shook his head. ‘It cannot be done.’
Valaric’s foot twitched. Oribas had laid lines of crumbly brownish powder across every entrance to the inner castle but people kept forgetting. Kept treading in them and scuffing them and Valaric was no better than anyone else. He wouldn’t even have considered it if Achista and Addic hadn’t told him how Oribas had faced down Sixfingers and all his ironskins armed with nothing else.
‘There are more than a thousand forkbeards in the valley now.’ Achista passed her hands over the table where a map lay spread out, another relic of the forkbeard Cithjan. Valaric had found it helpfully marked with all the places where forkbeards had been killed on the roads, and so the first thing he’d done was send his Crackmarsh men out looking for the Marroc who’d done it to see if they wanted to do it some more. Forkbeards had a thousand men in the valley? Fine. He had about half that, but most of them were proper fighting men with decent arms and he had an impregnable castle too and enough food for months. Sixfingers would have to do better.
‘There’s more crossing the Aulian Bridge all the time.’ Sarvic had been the one to come up with the idea of putting watchers on the other side of the river. The western side of the valley was wild and rugged and hardly anyone lived there. The forkbeards had never bothered much with it
except for Boyrhun. Sarvic’s men lit torches each morning before dawn to say how many forkbeards had crossed the bridge the day before.
Addic’s fists were getting tighter every minute. ‘You can’t just—’
His sister put her hand over his.
You can’t just abandon the town
. That’s what stuck in Addic’s throat. Truth be told, it stuck in Valaric’s as well, but if they tried to fight out in the open then the forkbeards would smash them to pieces and they all knew it. The road from the city to the castle, on the other hand, was a series of switchbacks with a gatehouse in the middle of each all stacked one on top of the next and walls overlooking every inch. ‘Jonnic, lead the sweep of the town. Achista, go with him.’ Maybe the sight of their Huntress would give the Marroc of the valley who hadn’t already run some heart; he’d not say no to a few more fighting men. ‘Addic, the salt. Sarvic, sort him out some men.’ Addic might never walk properly again and he certainly couldn’t fight, not yet, but he understood the Aulian wizard’s protections and railed about them more than the wizard himself. ‘Sarvic, go to the fourth gate and work your way up one more time. Make sure everyone understands when to close the gates and yes, yes, I know they’ll be bored to tears hearing it by now but they can hear it again. I’ll be at the lower gates doing the same. Oribas, you can come with me.’ They’d both be standing watch with the men at the first gate tonight but he didn’t need to say that just yet.
He left the others to it and walked through the castle, taking his time, stopping to talk to the men whose names he knew. There was a chance, after all, that he wouldn’t see them again, and so wherever there was any problem he stayed until it had been resolved and it was past noon before he even got out of the sixth gate and onto the road. There he looked down.
The sixth gate was different. The first five barred the
middle of each switchback and made a neat line up the mountainside, with ladders running up from the top of each gatehouse to the next. When the forkbeards started up the road and began their assault on the first gate, the men behind the second would be standing fifty feet over their heads, shooting arrows and dropping rocks and whatever else they could find. When the first gate fell, the men behind the second would fall back to the third and do the same again. As Oribas had shown him, the Aulians had designed their fortress so that each gatehouse could be left and allowed to fall, one after the next, while the attacking army would be bombarded all the way to the top, and even the men who manned the roof of each gatehouse could escape after it was overrun by climbing the ladders so their feet would never touch the road. The sixth gate was separate, built right at the end of the castle road, a notch of wall jutting out from the battlements with a small space behind it and then the Dragon’s Maw, while the castle yard opened up to one side. The forkbeards, if they reached the sixth gate at all, would be exhausted, battered, bloodied, the road behind them littered with their dead, and not a single Marroc would have had to raise his shield to defend himself. And yet when Valaric looked at the piles of stones and firewood, at the pots of fish oil carefully lined up along the roadside, it left him with a hole in the pit of his stomach. Their defence was based on an assumption that none of them spoke but all quietly made. One by one the gates
would
fall; one by one the forkbeards would take them, and in the end the forkbeards would win because the forkbeards always did, and all Valaric was doing was making it as bloody as possible. The feeling stuck with him right down to the first gate, looking down the castle road to Varyxhun. A grubby muddy market town when you put it beside Andhun and Sithhun and Kelfhun, not even a big one; but to the valley folk Varyxhun was a city and it was hard to imagine anything greater. Now
a steady stream of carts was heading up the Aulian Way to the higher valleys. He watched them, suddenly not having much else to do, while Oribas wandered the gatehouse for what must have been the tenth time. When he came back he still hadn’t found whatever he was looking for.
‘My people liked to dig,’ he said. ‘I thought there would be tunnels. We were always good with stone.’ He brightened. ‘Sometimes when my people built a defence like this, there would be a stone with a chain. A dozen strong men pulling on the chain would bring the stone down and without it the building would fall in on itself and block the road. A last defence, you see.’
‘Not much fun for the men pulling the chain.’
‘In those days they were usually slaves. Sometimes even the officers didn’t know. Famously so, in the battle of Iri—’
Valaric cut him off. ‘Will the Vathen be any better?’
Oribas stared, mouth still open at what Valaric had just said. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know the Vathen. The only one I’ve ever seen is the one you have in your cells.’ He paused, and Valaric already knew what the Aulian was thinking before he spoke it. ‘Gallow would fight for you. You should let them both—’
‘Don’t you start on me too, Aulian!’ Oribas was right though, and Arda was right. They were all right. Gallow would stand and fight Sixfingers to his last breath, and maybe the Vathan woman would too. And he could use every sword he could get, especially ones that had seen their share of fighting. But to have this castle defended by the very enemies he was trying to kill? He struggled with that. ‘I suppose you don’t know whether there’s any truth to what the Vathan says about the sword either.’
‘I’ve looked through the histories my people left in your library, but . . .’ Oribas only shrugged. ‘There’s a secret to this castle.’ He nodded up the slope to the tarn lake above it and then tapped the sacks of salt by their feet. ‘A secret
to its stories, to why my people came here and what they brought and why they built this castle where they did.’ Salt. The castle cellars had been full of it, a thousand sacks, a hundreds years old. Valaric saw no reason not to drop it on the forkbeards when they came. Sack of salt was as good as a rock, after all.
‘When you find out, you let me know,’ he said, after they’d both been quiet for a bit.
‘I will.’
Together they settled down to wait. To see what the night would bring.
S
pring came late to the mountain valleys, but it came at last. The sun shone bright and the air was warm and scented with pollen. Under his mail Reddic was sweating. On the top of the first gate beside him Valaric the Wolf and Sarvic and the three Jonnics and a dozen other men were probably sweating too. He hoped so, because that would mean it was the sun and the heat and not fear. On the road beneath the gate, within easy range of an arrow, stood a single forkbeard. He carried a shield and a spear with a white streamer tied to its top and he was just standing there. Further down the road, outside Varyxhun and away from the castle walls, another thousand forkbeards lined the valley, a single solid mass of shields blocking it from the Isset to the mountainside. The forkbeard on the road had Reddic’s attention though, all of it, because the forkbeard on the road was Medrin Sixfingers and the shield he carried was the Crimson Shield of Modris.
Nearly three weeks since the ghuldog had bitten him and his arm still hurt. Nowhere as bad as it been on the way to the Devil’s Caves but still sore. He hid it as best he could.
‘I could shoot him,’ muttered Sarvic. ‘It wouldn’t be any bother.’
Valaric growled, ‘He comes to parley.’
‘Fine. I’ll take that up with Modris when I see him.’ But he didn’t lift his bow and they all watched in silence a while longer, sweat dripping off them. Reddic wiped his eyes. He
didn’t understand why they were all just standing and looking at each other and no one was talking. Down on the road Sixfingers looked bored and was leaning on his spear.
‘Oh, get on with it.’ Fat Jonnic nudged Valaric. ‘He might not have sweated enough but I have.’
Reddic winced, but instead of throwing Fat Jonnic off the top of the gate Valaric sighed and closed his eyes and lifted the spear that had been sitting beside him all this time with its dirty white shirt knotted beneath the blade. He took one step closer to the edge and looked down at King Sixfingers. Took a long drink of water and then spat on the road below. ‘Well then, Sixfingers?
Medrin squinted up at them. ‘I’ve heard your voice before.’
‘You have. In Andhun I stood against you on the beach and behind the city gates, and I stand against you now. Poxscarred prince of filth! Twelve-fingered son of the Mother of Monsters. I’m Valaric of Witterslet. Valaric of the Marroc. Valaric the Wolf and I carry the red Sword of the Weeping God. Do you care to face me this time, Sixfingers, or are you the coward that even your own men know you to be?’
Sixfingers lifted his spear, stretched his arms and yawned. ‘Three years in your swamp, Valaric of the Crackmarsh, and not a single new rebuke? Truly, the turgid waters have seeped into your head. Or perhaps the ghuldogs have taken a bite out of you? As for your challenge?’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll fight you, Valaric of the Marroc, Valaric of Witterslet, you and I alone, but I’ll fight you at the top of this road not the bottom, between sundered gates ringed by the burned corpses of those who follow your foolishness. It won’t satisfy me just to kill you now; I mean to make an end of you that all Marroc will see.’ His voice rose as though he addressed the mountain itself. ‘For a year and a day this will be a castle of ghosts. Not one who hides behind these walls will I spare. Not one. Men will hang and women too. Children will burn.
Gibbets will rise and blood ravens will fly. The curse of the red sword lies on you all, Marroc of Varyxhun.’
Sarvic strummed his bow and then put an arrow to it. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ But Valaric knocked the arrow aside.
Sixfingers looked up to the gatehouse again and cocked his head. ‘Marroc who serve their king with good hearts tell me that tomorrow is your festival of Shiefa. They tell me you celebrate with ale and mead and dancing and singing and beckon the blushing bride of summer to shed her last clothes of winter. I’m told it’s a time for bonfires and bedding maidens and that even the dead rise to watch. Make your festival a grand one, Valaric of Witterslet, wherever that is. I’ll give you three days of kindness before I return with iron and fire.’
He turned and walked back down the road to Varyxhun. The army of waiting forkbeards lifted their shields and spears and roared and beat them one against the other in a slow steady rhythm. Sarvic drew out another arrow, and this time Valaric rounded on him and pushed him so hard he lost his balance. Sarvic threw out an arm to catch himself and almost barged Reddic off the battlement. ‘Sixfingers, Valaric! Sixfingers the demon prince of Andhun! Have you forgotten?’
Valaric grabbed two great fistfuls of Sarvic’s mail and pulled him close. ‘Have I forgotten?’ For a moment his face twisted into such a fury that even Angry Jonnic paled and took a step back. Valaric set Sarvic down. ‘No, Sarvic, I haven’t. But that doesn’t make it right to shoot a man in the back when he comes to parley. Not even if that man’s the devil.’
‘Took a finger of courage, coming up here like that all on his own.’ Fat Jonnic sniffed and scratched his chin.
‘And don’t you go and start admiring him, don’t you dare.
You
didn’t see Andhun.’
Reddic and Angry Jonnic stayed on the gate with a
handful of the Marroc from Varyxhun while Valaric and the rest of the Crackmarsh men climbed back to the castle. They slept the night on the battlements, eight of them out in the open wrapped up in their winter furs – the warm spring days didn’t change how cold the nights could be. They spent the next morning there too, and by the time Valaric sent his Crackmarsh men to relieve them, Angry Jonnic was ready to go and fight the forkbeards on his own. They climbed the ladders from gatehouse to gatehouse, all the way to the castle walls where Sarvic and a few others stood watch, looking down at Varyxhun and the forkbeard camp and the glittering rush of the Isset winding off to the north. Sarvic nodded as Reddic came past. ‘You wait and see. Sixfingers says he’ll come the dawn after next. But he won’t; he’ll come tonight when he thinks we’re all in our cups, raising them to Shiefa. Faithless forkbeard.’
Reddic thought he might go and look for Jelira, but even before he’d come down off the walls and crossed the castle yard, Valaric was waving at Angry Jonnic and so Reddic went too, and Valaric had the Aulian with him and a barrel full of arrows. He clapped Reddic on the shoulder. ‘Those iron heads you brought? Fletchers from Varyxhun have finished making them into arrows. There’s three thousand, give or take. That’s . . .’ He frowned.
The Aulian smiled. ‘Make them into bundles, ten arrows in each. One bundle to every man with a bow. What’s left to stay in the armoury.’
‘Ten arrows in a bundle?’ Jonnic picked up ten arrows and then looked at the barrel. ‘That’s all? That’s—’
‘Not enough arrows,’ finished Valaric curtly. ‘So they’d better count.’
‘Going to take us all day is what I was
going
to say!’
Valaric shrugged and pointed to two more barrels tucked in the shadows against a wall. ‘Needs to be done though, so best you get on with it.’
Jonnic took a deep breath but Reddic got in first and put a hand on Jonnic’s arm. ‘Go and find the children who came with the smith from Middislet. They can do it. I’ll stay with them and make sure it’s done right.’
Valaric smirked as Jonnic stamped off. ‘Arda won’t let you anywhere near her. You know that, don’t you?’
He was about to say he hadn’t any idea what Valaric was talking about but by then the Wolf and the Aulian had turned away. The Wolf was laughing. And he was wrong too, because when Jonnic came back he came with Nadric and Jelira and the three children and there was no sign of Arda at all, and for a while Tathic and Feya helped with counting the arrows into tens and tying twine around them, until they got bored and wandered off to where Nadric and Pursic were playing. Jelira and Reddic finished the rest on their own. They talked, hardly noticing the time, Reddic about the family he’d had once and his new family in the Crackmarsh, Jelira about the days she remembered back before the Vathen, before the forkbeards came again, the days when Gallow had been her father. They talked about happy things, times and places and people that made them smile and forgot for a while about the harshness that overshadowed them. By the time they were done with the arrows, the sun was setting and Angry Jonnic was coming across the yard. He clutched a jug of something, held it close like it was a lover, and for once he looked more merry than angry.
‘Looks like Sarvic and Valaric are wrong and the forkbeards aren’t coming tonight after all.’
Reddic reckoned that was the mead talking, given the night had barely begun, but kept the thought to himself. Jonnic beckoned Reddic forward, but when Jelira came too he shook his head and put an arm around Reddic’s shoulder and walked him away, whispering loudly and stinking of drink. ‘Got something for you.’ He struggled for a bit while he tried to hold on to Reddic and the mead jug and get
something off his belt all at once. Eventually he pressed a key into Reddic’s hand. ‘Valaric says to let him go. I don’t like it, mind, but Mournful don’t ever listen to me any more.’
‘Let who go?’
‘The Foxbeard.’ He snorted and shrugged. ‘Valaric says for you to do it. So go on then. Do it.’ He staggered off.
Jelira looked at him, face filled with worry. Reddic smiled and showed her the key. ‘Valaric says to let the Foxbeard g—’ He shook his head at his own stupidity. ‘I mean Gallow. Your d—’
And then he couldn’t have said how she covered the ground between them except that one moment they were a good ten feet apart and the next she was wrapped around him, head pressed against his chest, arms squeezing him as though she was wringing water out of a blanket. She led him by the hand to the sixth gate, skipping past the Dragon’s Maw and down the winding stairs to the dungeons beneath, past the cell where the strange-looking Vathan woman hissed at them and on to another. There was a guard on watch, sitting beside Gallow’s cell, pressed up against the iron bars. Gallow was on the inside, pressed up against them too, and it seemed odd to Reddic that Valaric would waste a man to guard the forkbeard and stranger still that any guard would sit so close; and then he realised this wasn’t a guard at all, this was Arda, and this was where she’d been when Angry Jonnic had gone looking and for the rest of the day too.
She stood up as she heard Reddic and Jelira and scowled. ‘Whatever you two want on Shieftane, I doubt very much I’m going to like it.’
Jelira threw herself at Arda and hugged her the way she’d hugged Reddic. Reddic just slipped the key into the cell door, opened it and stood back. And then took another step away as the Foxbeard unfolded himself from where he’d been crouched beside the bars and eased to his feet.
In the cramped space he looked huge, a head taller than Reddic and twice as wide, with arms to wrestle bears and fists strong enough to stun a boar. But then Jelira let go of Arda and ran into the cell and threw herself at him, and that and the bemused pain and joy on the Foxbeard’s face took away his menace.
‘Valaric the Wolf says you’re free to fight beside us,’ said Reddic, which wasn’t quite what Jonnic had said but it would do. But they’d already forgotten him. He watched the three of them wrapped up together tight in each other’s arms, and a pang of longing built up inside him and he had to turn away. He went up to the yard and stared at the moon for a bit and then found Angry Jonnic and stole his jug of mead. In the Hall of Thrones half the Crackmarsh men and most of the Marroc from Varyxhun were singing and dancing. Up on the walls Sarvic and a few others kept watch, those who wouldn’t trust a forkbeard’s word, not ever. Reddic let them all be. For now he wanted to be alone.
When the moon reached its zenith, Jelira came and found him and asked him if he’d seen Nadric and the little ones. He pointed her to the hall and she went away again, but after she’d found them she came back and nestled beside him, and later Reddic took her hand and led her up to the castle walls and they sat on the battlements together and got drunk on Angry Jonnic’s mead. Noises wafted up from the valley below but Jelira and Reddic were both lost, drunk on mead and each other, staring out over the Isset, which was lit up like silver by the moon.
The sun rose on the morning after Shieftane and then rose on the next and Reddic stood atop the first gate once more. Low grey cloud hung over the valley. The forkbeards were massing. The abandoned houses and taverns and stables and barns of Varyxhun had become their camp, and on the morning after the festival, as the Marroc nursed their sore
heads, the forkbeards had erected an avenue of wooden poles along the castle road. Reddic didn’t understood what they were at first, and then when he did, he wished he hadn’t. Gibbets. While he’d been sitting and dreaming in the moonlight with Jelira, the forkbeards had rounded up the Marroc of Varyxhun who were too stubborn or too stupid to leave. Now they lined the road, dangling.
A column of forkbeards was winding its way out of Varyxhun. He watched a while longer until he was sure and then he ran to the wall. ‘They’re coming! The forkbeards are coming!’ And when he peered closer he saw what it was that had kept them in the city these last few days. It wasn’t some simple gesture of kindness that had made Sixfingers leave them alone until the festival of Shiefa was past. They’d been building, and now four siege towers eased their way onto the road.
There wasn’t much to do now but watch and wait and pray to Modris.