Uprooted (51 page)

The lines didn’t seem to do anything, as far as I could see. They just hung in the air, only barely visible in the dark. Then dozens of bows twanged at once: Marek had three lines of archers ranged up behind his foot-soldiers. The arrows caught onto the silver lines and followed them straight home.

I put out a hand, a useless gesture of protest. The arrows flew on. Thirty men fell at once, cut down at a stroke, all of them defenders at the breach. Marek’s soldiers shoved into the gap, spilling into the trench, and the rest of his army crowded in behind them. They began to try and push the baron’s soldiers back towards the first passageway.

Every inch was hard-fought. The baron’s men had put up a bristling thicket of spears and swords pointing out ahead of them, and in the narrow space, Marek’s men couldn’t come at them without driving themselves onto the blades. But Solya sent another flight of arrows going over the walls towards the defenders. Sarkan had turned away: he was shoving through his papers, looking for a spell to answer this new one, but he wasn’t going to find it in time.

I put my hand out again, but this time I tried the spell the Dragon had used, to bring Kasia in from the mountainside.
“Tual, tual, tual,”
I called to the strings, reaching, and they caught on my fingers, thrumming. I leaned out and threw them away, down towards the top of the wall. The arrows followed them and struck against stone, clattering away in a heap.

For a moment, I thought the silver light was just lingering on my hands, reflecting into my face. Then Sarkan shouted a warning. A dozen new silver threads were pointing through the window—right at me, leading to my throat, my breast, my eyes. I only had one moment to grab up the ends in a bunch and blindly heave them away from me. Then the flight of arrows rushed buzzing in through the window and struck wherever I had thrown the lines: into the bookcase and the floor and the chair, sunk deep with the fletched ends quivering.

I stared at them all, too startled to be afraid at first, not really understanding that I’d nearly been struck by a dozen arrows. Outside, the cannon roared. I’d already begun to be used to the noise; I flinched automatically, without looking, still half-fascinated by how close the arrows were. But Sarkan was suddenly heaving the entire table over, papers flying as it smashed to the floor, heavy enough to shake the chairs. He pulled me down behind it. The high-whistling song of a cannon-ball was coming closer and closer.

We had plenty of time to know what was going to happen, and not enough to do anything about it. I crouched under Sarkan’s arm, staring at the underside of the table, chinks of light showing through the heavy wooden beams. Then the cannon-ball smashed through the window-sill, the opened glass panes shattering into fragments with a crash. The ball itself rolled on until the stone wall stopped it with a heavy thud, then it burst into pieces, and a creeping grey smoke came boiling out.

Sarkan clapped his hand over my mouth and nose. I held my breath; I recognized the stone spell. As the grey fog rolled gently towards us, Sarkan made a hooking gesture to the ceiling, and one of the sentinel-spheres floated down to his hand. He pinched open its skin, made a hole, and with another wordless, peremptory gesture waved the grey smoke into the sphere, until all of it was enclosed, churning like a cloud.

My lungs were bursting before he finished. Wind was whistling noisily in through the gaping wall, books scattered, torn pages riffling noisily. We pushed the table up against the open gap, to help keep us from falling out of the window. Sarkan picked up a piece of the hot cannon-ball with a cloth and held the sentinel next to it, like giving a scent to a hound.
“Menya kaizha, stonnan olit,”
he told the sentinel, and gave it a push out into the night sky. It drifted away, the grey of it fading into just a scrap of fog.

All that couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes—no longer than I could hold my breath. But more of Marek’s army had already crammed into the trench, and pushed the baron’s men back towards the first tunnel. Solya had flung another arrow-flight and opened more room for them, but more than that, Marek and his knights were riding just outside the wall behind them, spurring the men onward: I saw them using their horse-whips and spears against their own soldiers, driving them through the breach.

The ones in the front ranks were almost being pushed onto the defenders’ blades, horribly. Other soldiers were pressing up behind them, and little by little the baron’s soldiers were having to give way, a cork being forced out of a bottle. The trench was already littered with corpses—so many of them, piled on one another. Marek’s soldiers were even climbing up on top of the heaps to shoot arrows down at the baron’s men, as if they didn’t care that they were standing on the bodies of their own dead comrades.

From the second trench, the baron’s men began flinging Sarkan’s potion-spheres over the wall. They landed in blue bursts, clouds that spread through the soldiers; the men caught inside the mist sank to their knees or toppled over in heaps, faces dazed and sinking into slumber. But more soldiers came on after them, climbing over them, trampling them like ants.

I felt a wild horror, looking at it, unreal.

“We’ve misjudged the situation,” Sarkan said.

“How can he do this?” I said, my voice shaking. It seemed as if Marek was so determined to win he didn’t care how expensive we made the walls; he’d pay anything, anything at all, and the soldiers would follow him to their deaths, endlessly. “He must be corrupted—” I couldn’t imagine anything else that would let him spend his own men’s lives like this, like water.

“No,” Sarkan said. “Marek’s not fighting to win the tower. He’s fighting to win the throne. If he loses to us here, now, we’ll have made him look weak before the Magnati. He’s backed into a corner.”

I understood without wanting to. Marek really would spend everything he had. No price would be too high. All the men and magic he’d used already would only make it worse, like a man throwing good money after bad because he couldn’t stand to lose what he’d already spent. We couldn’t just hold him off. We’d have to fight him to the last man, and he had thousands of them left to pour into the battle.

The cannon roared once more, as if to punctuate the terrible realization, and then they fell suddenly and blessedly silent. Sarkan’s floating sentinel had dropped down upon them and burst against the hot iron. The dozen men working on the cannon had frozen into statues. One man stood before the left cannon with a rod thrust down the barrel; others were bent over gripping ropes, dragging the right cannon back to its place; still others held cannon-balls or sacks in their hands: a monument to a battle that wasn’t over.

Marek at once ordered other men to come and get the statues clear of the cannon. They began dragging and shoving the statues away, toppling them into the dirt. I flinched when I saw one smashing the fingers off the statues to pry out the ropes: I wanted to shout down that the stone-turned men were still alive. But I didn’t think Marek would care.

The statues were heavy and the work was slow, so we had a brief respite from the cannon-fire. I steadied myself and turned to Sarkan. “If we offered to surrender,” I said, “would he listen?”

“Certainly,” Sarkan said. “He’d put us both to death at once, and you might as well cut the children’s throats yourself as hand them over, but he’d be delighted to listen.” He took a turn thwarting the arrow spell: he pointed and spoke an incantation of misdirection, and another flight of silver-led arrows struck against the outer wall. He shook out his hand and wrist, looking down. “In the morning,” he said finally. “Even if Marek is willing to destroy his entire army, men can’t fight endlessly without a rest, and food and drink. If we can hold them until morning, he’ll have to call them off for a little while. Then he might be willing to parley. If we can hold them until morning.”

Morning seemed far away.

The pace of the battle ebbed for a little while. The baron’s men had retreated into the second trench entirely by now, filling the passageway in with corpses so Marek’s men couldn’t keep coming. Marek rode his horse back and forth outside the walls, simmering and angry and impatient, watching while his men struggled to get the cannon firing again. Near him, Solya settled into a steady rhythm of throwing arrow-flights into the second trench.

It was an easier spell for him to throw than for us to deflect. The arrow-heads were Alosha’s work. They wanted to find their way to flesh, and he was only showing them the way to go. Meanwhile we were trying to twist them from their purpose, fighting not just his spell but hers: the strength of her will, the hammer-strokes that had beaten magic and determination into the iron, and even the arrows’ natural flight. Pulling them aside was steady, grinding work, and meanwhile Solya threw his silver guiding lines into the air with wide easy sweeps of his arm, like a man sowing seeds. Sarkan and I had to take turns, each of us catching a flight at a time; each one an effort. We had no time or strength for any other working.

There was a natural rhythm to the work: dragging away a flight of arrows, like hauling on a heavy fishing-net, and then pausing to sip a little water and rest while Sarkan took his turn; then I would go to the window again. But Solya broke the rhythm, again and again. He kept the flights spaced apart exactly the worst amount of time: just close enough that we couldn’t sit down between them without having to spring up, and then every once in a while he let a longer time go by, or threw the arrows at us instead, or sent two flights out in quick succession.

“He can’t have an endless supply of them,” I said, leaning against the wall, drained and aching. There were boys with the archers who were hunting for spent arrows, pulling them out of corpses and from against the walls where they’d struck, and carrying them back to be shot again.

“No,” Sarkan said, a little distant and remote, also turned inward by the steady drain of magic. “But he’s keeping the flights small. He’ll likely have enough to last until morning.”

Sarkan went briefly out of the room after finishing his next turn, and brought back a sealed glass jar from the laboratory, full of cherries in syrup. He kept a big silver samovar on a table in the back corner of the library, which never ran out of tea: it had survived the ruin of the cannon-ball, although the delicate glass cup had fallen over and smashed. He poured tea into two measuring-bowls instead, and pushed the jar of cherries over to me.

They were the deep wine-red sour cherries from the orchards outside Viosna, halfway down the valley, preserved in sugar and spirits. I stirred in two heaping spoonfuls and greedily licked the spoon clean. They tasted of home to me, and the valley’s slow magic resting in them. He dipped only three of them out for himself, chary and measured, and he scraped the spoon on the edge of the jar, as though he was being careful, even now, not to take too much. I looked away and drank my own tea gladly with both hands cupped around the bowl. It was a warm night, but I felt chilled through.

“Lie down and get a little sleep,” Sarkan said. “He’ll likely try a final push just before morning.” The cannon had fired again at last, but without doing much harm: I guessed that all the men who really knew how to work them had been caught in the stone spell. Several of the balls had fallen short, landing among Marek’s own men, or went too far and flew past the tower entirely. The walls were holding. The baron’s men had covered the second trench with pikes and spear-hafts, and laid their blankets and tents on them, helping to hide themselves from the arrow-flights.

I felt thick even after the tea, tired and dulled like a knife that had been used to cut wood. I folded over the rug once to make a pallet, and it felt so very good to lie down on it. But sleep wouldn’t come. The silver arrow-flares lit the top of the window-frame at long, stuttered intervals. The murmur of Sarkan’s voice, turning them aside, seemed far away. His face stood in shadow, the profile sharp-outlined against the wall. The tower floor beneath my cheek and my ear trembled faintly with the fighting, like the distant heavy step of an approaching giant.

I shut my eyes and tried to think of nothing but my breath. Maybe I slept a moment; then I was sitting up with a jerk out of a dream of falling. Sarkan was looking down through the broken window. The arrow-flights had stopped. I pushed myself up and joined him.

Knights and servants were milling around Marek’s pavilion like stirred-up bees. The queen had come out of the tent. She was wearing armor, a mail shirt put over a simple white shift, and in one hand she carried a sword. Marek spurred over to her, bending down, speaking; she looked up towards him with her face clear and hard as steel. “They’ll give the children to the Wood as Vasily did me!” she cried out to him, her voice ringing loud enough to hear. “Let them cut me limb from limb first!”

Marek hesitated, and then he swung down from the horse and called for his shield; he drew his own sword. The rest of his knights were climbing down beside him, and Solya was at his side. I looked at Sarkan, helplessly. I almost felt that Marek deserved to die, after he’d driven so many of his men to death; but if that was what he really believed, if he thought we meant to do something dreadful to the children—“How could he believe that?” I asked.

“How could he convince himself that everything else was coincidence?” Sarkan said, already at his bookshelves. “It’s a lie that matches his desire.” He lifted one volume off the shelf in both his arms, a massive tome nearly three feet tall. I reached out to help him and jerked my hands away, involuntarily: it was bound in a kind of blackened leather that felt dreadful to the touch, sticky in a way that didn’t want to rub off my fingers.