Stormed Fortress Read online

  Kyrialt swallowed. He bent his dark head. Never to object, but in fact to veil his surging relief. The light in the glen had not left him unmarked: none who beheld his changed presence might deny the course of fate’s choosing. Given the conflict between duty and kin, his father’s grace spared him the cruelty of making his plea to go, anyway.

  Yet regret was not painless. ‘When I do this, you know my wife Glendien will insist she should not stay behind. There’s no way under Ath’s sky I can stop her.’ Nor could anyone do so; not without breaking her spirit.

  ‘Glendien knows, already.’ This time, his mother’s unswerving strength gave the kindness of understanding. ‘Your commitment is not solitary, though we tried. Her own family could not dissuade her. Unless your prince can change her mind, your lady will serve Rathain as the woman beside you.’ The strain upon those silk-veiled features stayed masked, upheld by more than state protocol.

  ‘Who better to send?’ Her pride rang before those who gathered to witness. ‘You were to become our realm’s next caithdein, and by appearance, the Teiren’s’Valerient has fallen shamefully short!’

  Kyrialt bowed. ‘I will defend Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn, as required. Not just for the sake of kingdom and clan, but with the whole of my heart.’

  His declaration closed the formalities. No one knew when the last summons would come. The seeress could not say whether the timing would permit a final leave-taking. Therefore, clan family seized on the moment to unburden its private sentiment. His mother swept forward. Silk hood thrown back, eyes wet, she embraced him. Her affection was followed by his full siblings, each one; then by his half-sisters and half-brothers, and their mothers, whose love also flowed without stint.

  His father came last. Erlien s’Taleyn gave up his rank and delivered the accolade on his knees. ‘Ath has gifted me with no better son. My blood is diminished, and my name in your shadow, to carry the debt to Rathain that our people can never repay.’

  Autumn 5671

  Deflections

  Touched by the echo of Elaira’s scried insight, Dakar bids the galley-man who gave him passage to put him ashore at the delta up-stream of Pellain; more sharp bargaining procures him three mounts and a stocked pack-horse, which he drives past the verges of Atwood with intent to join company with the enchantress and the Companion, Sidir …

  Returned from his search of the vaults underneath the burned ruins at Avenor, Luhaine bears dire tidings back to Sethvir at Althain Tower: that the four hatchling dragon skulls once bound under the influence of Koriani jewels in fact have fallen casualty to the fires, with their shades freed and subject to rise …

  The sun chases a blinding glitter of gold over the horse guard escorting Lysaer’s Lord Seneschal, a shimmering form in the Sunwheel tabard of an Alliance ambassador; yet the Light’s vested envoy meets Alestron’s shut gates, and his scribed ultimatum is spurned by Duke Bransian’s adamant silence …

  Autumn 5671

  IV.

  Feint and Assault

  The looming spectre of war strained the days that followed the rebuff of Lysaer’s sent envoy. That discordant, first note swelled into the overture that presaged the onslaught of siege. Both fortress towns at the mouth of the estuary dropped their posturing: Kalesh and Adruin launched ships for blockade and unleashed the advance of armed troops.

  Parrien’s war galleys still ranged at large. Yet even Duke Bransian’s bellicose temper acknowledged the damaging fact: the massing deployment set under way defanged his fleet as a tactical asset. Oared ships could not breast the rough, autumn sea. No vessel under Alestron’s flag might claim safe harbour in any port sworn to the Alliance. Cut off from access by blue-water sail, and the free territory under clan loyalties as his last source of provision, s’Brydion could only fume. His captains’ rapacious prowess was reduced to the strike-and-flee raiding of harriers. Such engagements might nip at the flanks of enemy shipping. But resupply could no longer reach the citadel with impunity. Not without running the gamut: the narrow inlet, with its vicious tides and its forty leagues of ledged shore-line that daily became entrenched by the tents and banners of hostile encampments.

  Each morning, Duke Bransian awoke to his wife, gauging his mood in sharp silence.

  ‘Death and plague, woman!’ he barked at last, distempered by too many quandaries. ‘Why not just spit out your opinion? By the red spear of Dharkaron’s vengeance, a man could watch his parts shrivel under your hag-ridden glowering!’

  Liesse pushed her raw-boned frame upright in bed and eyed the bristling jut of the beard on the pillow. ‘You would actually listen?’

  ‘I always listen,’ the duke said, annoyed. ‘Just hang your silly, unnatural notion, that hearing means following your orders.’

  His duchess snorted with peeling contempt. ‘The day you take instruction from anyone else, we’ll be torching your corpse at your funeral!’

  ‘Don’t tell me again that we should have tucked tail and not ripped with bared teeth for the jugular!’ Unmoved, lounging flat amid crumpled sheets, the duke crossed his battle-scarred forearms. ‘Prince Arithon chose to abandon us, first. He well deserves the whip-lash he’ll get from that snip chosen as his caithdein.’

  ‘You presume I would lose the same argument twice?’ Liesse flounced from the mattress. Beyond the keep’s floor-boards, scarred by hobnailed boots, an orange sunrise brightened the arrow-slit. The glare spat sullen glints off the bronze-cornered chests, and burnished the steel bosses of the duke’s baldric, carelessly slung on a chair-back. ‘It’s not Rathain’s feckless prince,’ she admitted, ‘but the warnings delivered by three Fellowship Sorcerers that set the cold into my liver.’

  ‘My heir should be wearing tanned buckskins in Atwood? Ath, woman! You bleed me!’ Bransian levered upright, to a groan from the bed-frame, which also bore scars, where an ancestor had stabbed his knives inside of arm’s reach in the head-board. ‘Sevrand’s an adult. Let him choose for himself.’

  The duke kicked off the blankets and snatched for the grimy gambeson that had padded yesterday’s chainmail. ‘You would shame me ahead of the Fatemaster himself! No fighting man on these walls will stand firm, believing I planned on defeat.’

  To which Liesse bent her head. Face buried amid her uncombed brown hair and the clutch of exasperated fingers, she sighed.

  Bransian’s bunched fists released, as he realized she was trembling. ‘Wife!’ he barked, sucked hollow by tenderness. One barefoot stride and he gathered her close: her tears would bring him to his knees, if not wring him wretchedly gutless. ‘You should fear a few enemies?’

  ‘No,’ Liesse gasped, muffled. She raised her chin from his chest, coughing back laughter. ‘I should despair of the hope you could reach for clean clothes before letting the filth rot them to rags off your back!’

  Yet no biting humour might stem the Alliance advance that surged in on them like flood-tide.

  As the new morning brightened, the shore-side watch beacons relayed more damning reports. Alliance companies now mushroomed over the muddied acres left scorched by the reivers’ torch. Hourly, more troop-laden warships hove in. Anchored hulls jammed the coves like teeth in a trap, until the expectant tension locked down, cranked as an overtaut drumhead.

  Day followed day. From lookout tower, to battlement, to the eyrie vantage of the upper citadel, the sentries flashed mirrors in coded signal. Alestron watched Lysaer’s grand war host assemble, until the counters that burdened Bransian’s maps swallowed all of the surrounding shore-line. Dawn followed dawn, while the town hunkered down behind fast-shut gates and denied egress to out-bound civilians.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Fionn Areth complained from his leaned stance between the Sea Gate’s battle-scarred merlons. Above him, the massive groan of the winches raised the hoist, bearing stone-shot and slopping, filled casks. Saltwater was being stockpiled ahead, for the flammable hidings that guarded the foundations under the ramparts.

  As the platform’s shadow scythed over his face, the
goatherd sawed on in his Araethurian twang, ‘Shouldn’t the duke bless every tuck-tailed coward who wishes to leave? Why hang on to their chicken-shit mouths? They’re just wasting his food stores and draining his cisterns.’

  ‘Morale,’ stated Jeynsa, as bitten as forest-bred manners could frame a response.

  Fionn Areth slid his gaze sideward and studied her. A tall, freckled lynx, she lounged with her chin on her fist, while the wind fluttered through her knife-cropped brown hair. Her bitten-off nails were black-rimmed with tar. That would be the remnant of yesterday’s toil, a longshoreman’s morning spent loading the pitch barrels sent to the Wyntok Gate.

  Engrossed, the grass-lander chafed to dissect the enigma she represented. Forestborn daughter of a former high earl, she wore bladed weapons as though bred to war. Though her woman’s build could not outmatch a man’s bulk, the fact never humbled her manner. Jeynsa’s brazen promise to summon her crown prince gave even s’Brydion aggression a frost-ridden pause. If the duke and his brothers were wont to treat her tenderly for a move that bordered on treason, their citadel’s matrons, with their clinging toddlers, applauded her as a saviour.

  For Fionn Areth, the fascination stayed fresh: he wondered how Arithon was going to handle the chit, if and when he chose to arrive.

  Until then, the arena became verbal prodding. ‘Morale, so you say?’ the grass-lander mused. ‘Then you’d be the going expert on sieges, come from an even more back-country birthright than I?’

  Jeynsa laughed. ‘Rats leave sinking ships. The s’Brydion banner has never been struck.’ Six hundred and fifty-three years to the day, all campaigns to rout charter rule from Alestron had been smashed at punishing cost. ‘Clanblood doesn’t shrink at long odds. Let the squeamish guilds bleed their wealth from this town, or pack off their wives and young children, there’s too little left at stake to stem losses. Some panicked town turncoat might unlatch the back-postern, or take bribes to welcome the enemy.’

  But no assault in Alestron’s proud history carried the threat levelled now.

  Fionn Areth had shared the look-outs’ reports. He had heard the opinions of Vhandon and Talvish, and eavesdropped on grim talk in the barracks. If today’s white-capped view from the Sea Gate embrasure did not show the invidious advance at the harbour mouth, the truth was not secret: their sea-bound supply line was thwarted. Kalesh and Adruin commanded the narrows. The massed counters stacked on the duke’s tactical maps also stymied the citadel’s access by trade-road. Just as likely, the outer gates had been barred to stop nervous deserters from joining the enemy.

  The more telling point, to Fionn Areth’s stark eye, was how the sorcerer known as the Spinner of Darkness would grapple the appalling scale of sheer numbers. If the Teir’s’Ffalenn elected to bestir himself, and risk Jeynsa’s bid for protection; the grass-lander felt qualified to weigh the question. His own reprieve, snatched from the scaffold, had not been the pitched target of three kingdoms’ fanatical muster.

  ‘Charter law would seem scarcely a boon,’ he declared. ‘Or why else should you lump those of us without lineage in arse-kissing terms with your foemen?’

  That touched a nerve, finally. Jeynsa straightened and stared. Green as fire in opal, her glance raked him. ‘Ask your royal double how my father died. Then remember. The price in bloodshed on Daon Ramon Barrens was the cost of your rescue from Jaelot’s executioner.’

  ‘I was not made party to your prince’s choice,’ Fionn Areth said, a piercing fact to strike wind from his victim.

  But not Jeynsa Teiren’s’Valerient, who backed down from no scrap: whose arms underneath her short-sleeved leather jerkin wore bruises gained sparring with Sevrand at quarterstaves. ‘You dare to pass judgement on me? Or set me up for comparison?’

  Fionn Areth sustained her blistering stare. ‘I condemn nothing,’ he pronounced without shame. ‘Rather, I’d ask: are you Arithon’s friend or his enemy?’

  That touched a nerve, also. Fanned rage chilled to ice. Jeynsa sized up the goatherd’s antagonism, then dismissed his bold query, unflinching. ‘You’ve spent too much time under Talvish’s heel, in quarters with rank-and-file fighting men. They measure by nothing else but brute force, which dangerously narrows your view-point.’

  ‘Then show me,’ Fionn Areth insisted.

  Jeynsa snapped up his challenge and led him through the town. Not from the vantage of the inner citadel, whose lofty battlements had been raised by Paravians. Not over the chain-bridge to the middle town district, where the cast shadow of pending attack dimmed the air with stirred dust from lance drills on the practice field. Nor where the squads of sweating men laboured, refining the range of the trebuchets. Instead, Jeynsa marched him into the arched carriage-way that fronted the ducal residence.

  A wagon was parked by the carved, granite steps, with their pillars of Highscarp marble. The four-in-hand team at the hub of activity wore gleaming harness, brasses studded with Alestron’s bull blazon. There, Jeynsa prevailed upon Mearn’s pregnant wife, and asked for the two of them to accompany her on the daily rounds shared between the ranking s’Brydion women.

  ‘Someone must hear and respond to the people,’ Lady Fianzia explained to the baffled Araethurian. Her piled, blonde hair was wound with strung pearls, a delicate accent to her jade dress, trimmed at the hem with white ribbon. Blunt as flint, despite the kestrel’s build that seemed overwhelmed by her ripened belly, she tipped her chin towards the servant who loaded a stacked pile of hampers. ‘Lend a hand. We’ll be away, soonest.’

  ‘You’ve packed bread for the needy?’ Fionn Areth inquired, hefting baskets that smelled of fresh baking.

  Fianzia arched her eyebrows in signal offence. ‘Shame on you, goatherd! Alestron’s seat rules under charter law!’

  The grass-lander scowled through his tumbled, black hair. When he failed to amend his insulting mistake with apology, the lady gathered up her full skirt. She declined Jeynsa’s help; leaned on the armed man-servant, who assisted her gravid weight up to the driver’s seat.

  ‘Get in, young fool!’ The instant her passengers clambered aboard, she took reins and whip into tiny, ringed hands and rousted the team out with tart vehemence. ‘Jeynsa was right. Your presumptions are dangerous. Stuck as you are with the face of a prince, you’d better learn quick what sets us apart from the usurping mayors.’

  The wagon rolled out of the carriage-way to the brisk jingle of harness bells. Past the arched gate with its charging bull finials, Fianzia steered the gleaming horses down-slope. No novice, she jockeyed between the drays that ground uphill with stockpiled supply for the warehouses. She threaded the steep, switched-back turns and showed crisp courtesy to the other drivers. Baled fodder, crated livestock and chickens, barrels of flour and beer, and sacks of hulled oats and barley vied for space with packs of shouting children. From the smithies came chests of crossbolts and arrows, and for the defenceworks, the reeking scraped hides, bundled up green from the stock-yard.

  Few vehicles moved outbound. Fianzia’s wagon seemed out of place, breasting the war-time bustle past the stone mansions and officers’ homes in the merchant precinct. Her place on the whip’s box commanded no deference. The ducal badge on the lead horses’ bridles was scarcely imposing enough to draw notice.

  Yet the way parted for her. Amid din and turmoil, through dust and smoke, acrid with the bite of quenched steel and the charcoal fumes from the armourers’, she drove like a breath of spring sunshine. Irascible carters granted her precedence. The armed guards at the barbican saluted her through. By now sweated over their burnish of grooming, the horses clopped through the slatted lanes, bordered by wood-frame tenements; past the tiny, fenced yards with their pecking hens, and the shuttered sheds, where the journeymen’s shacks butted into the shops of the craft quarter.

  Mearn’s lady reined up at length in a cramped, public courtyard, criss-crossed with string lines drying laundry. The cobbles were slicked with puddles and run-off, centred by a neighbourhood well. Hung linen snapped on the sea-b
reeze. The tin strips of iyat banes jangled. Children in motley peeped through potted herbs and leaned at the railings of the outdoor stairways. Women with crying babes and toddlers in tow gossiped over yoke buckets, or else pounded soiled clothes in hooped tubs.

  No citizen was ill-fed. The matrons’ stout arms gleamed with bracelets. Some wore gemstone beads and enamel, and others, fine rings of wrought wire. The garments they scrubbed for their households were plain: stout broadcloth biased with wool, but not ragged. As Fianzia invited, the hampers were shared, food and wine passed with cheerful camaraderie.

  While Fionn Areth and Jeynsa did a groom’s work, and steadied the draught team’s bridles, Fianzia sat down on the lowered tail-board. Patient, she listened to whatever subject the women who gathered might broach. She answered their questions, no matter how difficult, making no effort to hide that the siege would draw Lysaer’s might to attempt their destruction. Duke Bransian had set aside barracks space. All families were invited to shelter within the Paravian-built walls of the upper citadel. Folk need do no more than submit their names to be assigned to a billet.

  Several voices protested.

  ‘We can’t leave our craft shop!’

  ‘My husband’s smithy is all of our livelihood!’

  Fianzia set down her wine goblet. ‘Whoever decides not to evacuate won’t be left abandoned without due protection.’ She qualified through the expectant silence, as molasses sweets quieted the fretful children, and the pearl cincture just unwound from her hair was dangled to distract a wailing infant. ‘No less than the duke’s immediate family are entrusted to shoulder your safety.’