An echoing crack came from below, shivering the stones of the tower. Vivaine’s fingers tightened on the wreath she was weaving, and a strand of holyvine snapped in her hands. The pattern frayed; vine, juniper, and white ribbon came loose. She could feel the power leach from it, and the dusty-green leaves turned brittle.
It did not matter, she told herself. Neither a keepsafe charm nor the silent prayer to the Mother she had woven it with could help her now. But panic bubbled up in her throat, and she struggled to keep from making a noise. She had to know what was happening. They could see nothing in this room, small and close and lined with tapestries and rugs, as though that could keep out the siege like the winter cold. The tower room had once been her retreat, and it was now her cell.
She threw her head back and surged to her feet. The ladymaids and Emaris, the old chatelaine, watched her move across the room as though she were a serpent that might turn on them. Even Emaris had given up her pretense of needlework, and sat with her hands folded and her white, starchy face staring out of her wimple. They were all waiting interminably for the horror to be over, or for the horror to come to them and break down their door.
The king’s men might harm the chatelaine and her maids, but they were not hunting for them. They were hunting for a witch.
Vivaine fed the wreath to the fireplace, gripping the mantel to steady herself. She turned to the window. The shutters were bolted tight, but through them they could all hear a distant howl of voices and clanging steel, and the smell of smoke in the night air. The town had been burning since the morning. Vivaine wrestled with the shutter-bolt with shaking fingers. She heard the creak of brigandine armor behind her as the guardsman at the door moved.
“We’d do best to keep that shut, milady,” came Dalton’s gruff voice. She did not turn around for worry of what he might see in her face.
“Let me look out for a moment, for mercy’s sake,” she snapped at him. The bolt slid free and she pulled the shutters open, breathing in a gasp of cool air and smoke. The noise grew louder in her ears. The battle was distant and shadowy, lit only by torches and the smoldering ruins of the town. It was like seeing shadows move in a nightmare, imps crawling far below. Did the king’s soldiers not need sleep, like hounds crazed by the hunt? It came to her that they must be close to overtaking the castle to press on through the night like this. She shuddered, and tried to fix her eyes on the gates. They were still standing. She could see the press of Greylake men, some of them in blue and silver, and the great oak-timbers that they braced the gates with. There came another terrible crack, and a ripple of impact through the men. The king’s men had a battering ram. There was fighting on the battlements. And beyond that, in the darkness, grey ranks glinting with steel and campfires burning as far as the shores of the Lake...
“Keep it shut,” Dalton repeated, more harshly. “Before a lit arrow comes in. They have burned the stables and half the garrison down.”
Vivaine slowly pulled the shutters closed and locked them, her heart beating in her throat. She could have scried and seen the battle more clearly, but she did not want to know what water and crystal would show her now. This isolation had its mercies. She retreated to her chair and found one of the maids, Marienne, staring at her with fearful blue eyes. “The gates are holding,” Vivaine said quietly. Dalton was silent. She forced herself to look at him, at the way the firelight gleamed on the leather-and-steel hilt of the sword sheathed at his side. There were two other men-at-arms on the stair, but Dalton Bloodhind, favored among Reult’s men, was guarding against what lay within the tower.
Did he think that she might fling herself from the window? Or was it another kind of madness he feared? It was telling that, even with the king’s army at their gates, she and her powers were still a threat to Greylake.
She cleared her throat. “Is there any word from Armais or Longmere...?”
The guardsman’s short, brusque “No milady” told her all she needed to know. She had never shared Reult’s surety about the northern dukes. Talk of new loyalties and new powers in the kingdom had begun to fade once the young prince-king in Lyonsmouth had seized control of the throne and sent his men marching north with orders to burn dissent from the duchies. The silence that followed her question was heavy with unspoken despair. Vivaine tried to break it.
“Let me go out and see if I can help,” she ventured. “I could heal . . .” As soon as it was spoken she knew the folly of that idea. Very few of the men would let her touch them, much less work witchcraft on them as they lay bleeding.
Dalton Bloodhind looked at her, his face stony. She was lucky that he would even speak to her. He crossed his arms and settled himself more firmly before the door, the metal of his armor and weapons clinking. “You are safest here, milady.” After a pause, he said stiffly, “You can do your work from here.”
Vivaine glanced down at her hands. She had already worked what she could, and paced across the floorboards of her workroom so many times that she could not stand to be in there any longer. The wards had sent her down to the walls of Greylake with chalice and chimes, where the villeins stared at her and murmured prayers to the Mother. But she had felt the wards break early this morning. When a man set his will to something, little could stop him, and when thousands of men set their wills to the destruction of Greylake, what could a few stretched-thin spells of protection hope to do?
This was far, far beyond her. The convent had taught her to pray, to charm, and to heal. The Sisters had not taught her anything of war. She was no sorceress, but she was the closest thing to one that Reult had been able to find. No number of beautiful grimoires or instruments, bought with her husband’s coin and cunning, could turn one woman into a powerful Circle of witches. Mother help her, she had lied to him sometimes about what she could do, when it was something passing unseen, but only to appease him...
Boots thudded on the stair. She jerked upright where she sat, and Dalton drew an inch of steel, staring through the barred grate in the door. One of the maids whimpered. The soldiers couldn’t have breached the keep yet, could they? Abruptly, Dalton shoved the iron latch back and the door skidded open, and one of the men-at-arms stopped dead in the doorway. Beads of sweat were rolling down his pockmarked face, and there was something dark smeared across his tunic. Was it soot or blood?
“His Grace is wounded,” he croaked. “Badly.” His jaw hung open as though he were going to say something else, but nothing came.
“Where is he, Ger?” Dalton snapped, but Vivaine was already pushing past them, into the landing, running for the door to her workroom on the other side. Inside, the curving room blazed with candlelight against shuttered windows. She brushed past hanging garlands of herbs, snatching her rowan wand from its crux, seizing a gilded chalice from the Mother’s altar and dashing the left-over dregs onto the floor. Bloodroot, wyvern’s tongue... Her hands fumbled over the phials on her herbiary shelves, gathering up the most potent.
Nothing else she could take would be more precious than time. Her instruments bundled under her arm, she darted outside again. “Take me to him,” she said, and her voice sounded firmer, hasher, than she felt. They pounded down the spiraling stairs, Ger’s ragged breathing echoing in the closeness of the tower. The rim of the chalice dug into her ribs. “What happened?” she demanded.
“One of the king’s dogs got a spear under his armor. Piked His Grace like a footsoldier.”
She felt sick. An image of the keepsafe charm snapping in her hands lit up before her, and she almost stumbled. Had it been at that moment that—
There was something at the foot of the stair, beside the doorway, a hunched shape. Bona the Crone. Horrified, Vivaine saw that the hedgewitch held a bowl of dark, glistening blood in her lap, and a motionless mass of feathers lay beside her. Hen’s blood or not, to call upon such magic here... “What are you doing?!” she cried, anger rushing through her with such vicious force that she was surprised by it. Bona’s pale eyes turned up towards her.
“The augury—” Bona began, in her thin, high voice.
“How dare you work bloodcraft in my tower!” Her hands were shaking with fury. “Men are dying and you are poisoning the Veil with—with this!”
“My lady,” came the man-at-arm’s uncertain interruption. She had no time for Bona, and no power to spare to stop her.
“I hope you are haunted on your deathbed by the souls of these men!” she snarled, and burst through the door, gathering her skirt as she ran down the narrow hallway through the duchess’s quarters. The roar of the battle was louder here, like a monster stalking through stone walls. The heat of her anger turned to cold sweat again.
In the dim, vaulted space of the entrance hall, she saw a crowd of figures in armor and leather: men-at-arms, page boys, and servants gathered like worshippers on a Chantry frieze. There was grime and blood everywhere, every tunic a butcher’s apron. The great door in its carven arch was barricaded with lumber and nails and waiting for the battering ram.
She craned her neck but could see nothing as she approached, until she drew near enough and the men noticed her. Then they pulled back, recoiled far enough for her to see her husband.
They’d put him on one of the stone benches. His armor had been silver-bright this morning, and now it was dull with dust and dented over his breast. Below his waist, fresh, bright blood leaked in rivulets over his tassets. Bile surged in her throat, and she bit her cheek to fight it back.
Reult was still awake, and hissing insults at Guard Captain Jehann from between gritted teeth as the man tried to get him to drink from a cup of water. Vivaine knelt beside him, her fingers on the straps of his armor before she dared to look into his eyes. “Help me get his breastplate off,” she urged the Captain. Reult reached down and grasped her chin, his leather gauntlet scraping against her cheek. She knew the face that he saw—tawny, sharp, framed by waves of black hair—but she did not know if he would love or hate the sight of it now. Reluctantly, she lifted her eyes to his. He was so grey, and his lips were stained red. He looked nothing like himself, almost . . . powerless.
“Don’t waste time,” he spat at her, the muscles in his throat cording with the effort. “Your magic. Why did I keep a witch . . . in Greylake’s tower, if not for this? You will save me. I will have you . . . save me!” His words ended in a low groan, and his hand dropped.
Captain Jehann had managed to work his breastplate free. The wound was through his stomach and bowels, long and deep, and hemorrhaging blood. She could smell the putrefaction. “Hallowed Mother,” she whispered, struggling with a flood of nausea. “Staunch the wound, quick,” she managed to say, and scrabbled for her wand. The guardsman’s hands and stained linen covered the gash again, and as Reult grunted in pain she inhaled, reaching for the Veil.
Power seeped through her, softening the air around her, lifting twining curls from her hair to float as though stirred by the wind. She raised her wand, feeling it resonate with the chords of his flesh. It strained in her guiding hand as she sought to knit off the small blood vessels. But with each little victory, she could still feel the terrible depth of the wound, split deep into his organs. The great blood vessels were out of the reach of her wand, and she could sense the blackening of corruption spreading from his bowels. Was there any possibility of recovering him from this?
She did not dare make an answer to that. All she could do now was work. The filigree of veins twined in her senses like roots, and she bade them grow and seal, flesh creeping slowly after them. But below the the surface of skin and muscle, his inner organs would not respond to her coaxing. They had been too badly damaged. And in that soft darkness blood was leaking from him, pooling in the cavities of his stomach. This could not be healed at once; she had to try and keep him alive.
She cracked her eyes open, feeling the ache of her knees on the flagstones and the stiffness of her neck. Her vision blurred for a moment, and then she focused on Reult. He was still breathing, with slow labor, and his tanned face was ashen. The linen over his stomach was soaked in crimson. “Water,” she asked, and her voice cracked. “Give me water.”
Someone handed her the cup that Reult had drunk from. She set her chalice on the floor and poured the water in. It took her three tries before she could pull the cork from her vial of bloodroot, for her hands were shaking badly. But then it was mixed, and she laced her fingers around the stem of the chalice, calling up her magic again. The chalice began to glow, light shimmering from the gilded bowl as though the red-tinted water was rosy crystal. Sweat beaded on her forehead.
Distantly, she heard Captain Jehann say, “The bleeding has stopped, Your Grace,” and her gaze slid over to see him lift the gory linen, and she heard a gasp at the sight of the wound. It was almost closed, a dark-red line as thin as a hair at the ends but wet and open in a patch at the center. Reult said nothing, but she choked out, “He is still torn inside, and still hemorrhaging.” There was silence.
Vivaine rose up on her knees and bent over her husband with the chalice. “Drink,” she begged, and tried to lift his head. The Captain helped her, and she pressed the cup to Reult’s lips. He drank, and when the tincture was gone his green eyes were open, staring at her. “It is working,” he rasped, his chest heaving for breath with each word. “The pain is gone.”
She nodded, unable to speak for a moment. Then, she managed, “My lord, you know that . . . I cannot heal a mortal wound.”
His hand tightened on her skirts, and a glimpse of his old vitality flared in his eyes, though now it only made him look feverish. “You have failed me as a woman,” he said from between clenched teeth. “Will you fail me now . . . as a witch, when I need you most?” Breath was rattling in his chest. “What good, then, is a wife?”
“I am doing everything that I can,” she whispered, turning away from him. Her wand was in her hand again, and she hunched over him, pressing her fingertips against his stained skin. The rowan wand radiated with magic, but his body would not respond. She realized now how far gone he was, even with her draught, and how exhausted she had become. She strained, drawing deeper into the Veil, but it seemed as though she could gather up nothing more. Something was wrong—or was it only hubris, thinking that she was capable of more than this?
Time hung still and stretched out as she fought within him and within herself, but gained no ground. In the darkness behind her eyelids, she heard Reult’s voice in a whisper, close by and yet so far away. She could not tell if he spoke to her or to another. “Please. I am so tired.”
And then in the next slow moments, his chest fell under her hand and did not rise again. She felt his blood stop in its courses.
“No,” she murmured, but the word hardly made it past her lips. She opened her eyes and looked for him. All the lines of hostility had been smoothed from his face. A glimmer of green iris showed between his lids, but he was blind now. Numb, she reached out and brushed a dark curl from his forehead, as she had done when she was a girl and still in love with him.
An arm in chainmail obscured her vision as Captain Jehann bent over him. “He is dead,” he pronounced, and the words echoed strangely in her ears. She rocked back on her heels, and the wand clattered from her slack grip, rolling under the bench.
“We’ll keep the word from the men as long as possible,” the Captain was saying grimly. “We fight for our freedom until the walls fall. He would have wanted it. His last orders—”
“No,” another voice broke in, deeper and rougher. One of the quartermasters. “What choice do we have now but surrender? The madness ends now. Surrender, and we save the lives of hundreds.“
Murmurs of agreement rose around her, from the circle of men staring down on their dead liege lord.
Vivaine swayed on her knees, unable to look up. She was a widow now, and a witch without a protector. Her own death would not be quiet, but pass in a blaze of fire and screaming. None of the men around her would be sorry to see her go to the stake; in their eyes, she had always been a curse upon the duke, from the moment she ensnared him in the convent at Rauen. It would have looked better if she could manage tears now, but her eyes were dry. The king’s men might have mercy if they surrendered the witch . . .
She lunged to her feet and stumbled out of the crowd. Someone’s hand brushed her arm, but no one stopped her, no one called out to seize her. Awash with dizziness, she made it across the hall—but in the archway stood Bona. Her graying hair was awry and eyes were wide.
“Open your wings and fly, my lady,” she crowed, reaching for her. “Fly!”
Vivaine recoiled, cracking her shoulder on the wall as she fled the hedgewitch’s mad laughter. The shadowy hallway to her quarters swallowed her up again. She reached her bedchamber and slammed the door behind her. Inside, the only light was the fire burning down in the grate. Vivaine’s knees buckled and she sat down on the edge of her bed. Her breathing was high and fast in her own ears.
She was no longer welcome here, if she had ever been. The siege would be broken soon. Flight was her only choice; she had to get out of the castle and away from the king’s soldiers and the fire they left in their wake.
Though she had run deeper into the warren of the castle, she would not be cornered here. Bona could not know this, but perhaps in her madness she had guessed that Vivaine had a way to escape these walls. No wings, only the power of her own hands.
She had made some small preparations, and now they seemed like the things a child might do before an outing. Not enough for what faced her. The chance that these walls might crumble had never seemed real to her until now. All she had was a knapsack hidden in her wardrobe, packed with some traveler’s rations and her woodswoman’s kit, which she took with her when riding out into the forest in search of herbs for her craft, and solitude. And laid out upon her broadchest were five small objects, humble enough to be mistaken for an innocent crafter’s work, but all older than she was and steeped in magic. A simple cup of aged silver for the sigil of the Waters; a round, river-polished bloodstone for the sigil of Stone; a lacquered reed pipe for the sigil of the Winds; an etched steel fire-striker for the sigil of the Sun and Moon; and a slim dark wand of witch hazel, slightly crooked and knotted so that it might have been only a twig, for her own sigil of the Greenwood.
An instrument for all five points of the Circle, and yet as she tucked them into her knapsack with shaking fingers, it seemed as though she needed so much more. She would rather have a blazing sword and a golden wand right now, than face the howling world outside with these trinkets. But grand relics could not save her; unassuming instruments might allow her to work her craft undetected. If she made it past the army outside.
Fleeing in a velvet gown, likewise, would do her no good. She tore through the laces of her gown and reached for her riding clothes. The moss-green dress was plain enough for a villein’s daughter, and if the oilskin cloak lined with rabbit fur might be more suspicious, it was also invaluable. She knew from experience that it was warm enough to spend a night in the wild with. It was the Vineyard Moon, and the weather was still mild, but it would grow colder. Her mind was clearing with these practical concerns, but she could not help but listen for pounding on her door. They would come for her soon, surely.
Her purse was hidden behind the loose stone in the fireplace and she pried it free now, glancing within. Silver coronets and copper glinted at her, with the lonely faces of two gold crowns. Reult rarely gave her coin, but she had managed to save up this much. Not enough to keep her for long, but it was some comfort that the purse itself was spelled against thieves’ notice, painstakingly woven from the craft and castoff silk by Sister Inavessa. She unclasped from around her neck the thin chain that held her marriage token, a glitter of sapphire fragments set in silver around one small pale diamond. It was no duchess’s dowry, but it was the most costly thing she had. She slid chain and token into her purse, and pushed it deep into the pocket of her riding dress.
There was no more time to stand and think. She fastened her cloak and shouldered the knapsack, and went not to the door, but to the window.
Unbolting the shutters, she eased them open. Outside, shouts and crashes drummed through the dark sky, the stars obscured by a haze of smoke. Her quarters lay in the rear of the castle, where the wall fell away in a curtain of stone to the slope below, and the ground tumbled to the sprawl of woods behind the castle. It was a poor approach for an attack, a face of the castle with more arrow-slits than windows. She was relieved but not surprised to see no lights or movement in the dark forest below. No—two torches bobbing near the eastern tower, in opposite orbits of patrol. She could not see if there were sentries on the ramparts above her.
But it was clearer than she could have hoped. Vivaine took a deep breath, feeling the sweat cool on her brow. There was a tree that grew near the base of the wall, a crooked, hardy black walnut tree, so tall that its branches brushed the stones a few feet below her window. It had not always been so tall, nor so crooked. Many times over the past six years, she had used it as a means of escape from her bedchamber, most often to go out herb-picking without having to beg her leave of the guards and pass through the stares of every villein in the town. More than once she had used it to escape Reult’s temper, after he had ordered the latch-bolt removed from the inside of her door and fastened on the outside instead. But every time, she had returned to the castle eventually. Not this time.
She took out her wand and braced her hand against the masonry. She had the strength for this last spell; she had to. This was not the strange and gory inner workings of the body, but the solid, green, and simple magic of trees. She closed her eyes, and opened her heart to the Veil. Fickle power, it swam away from her like the stars in the smoky sky. Concentrating, she just grasped it and channeled her will into the wand, reaching out towards the black walnut tree. And slowly, creakily, the tree reached back.
Sweat was dripping from her chin when the branches finally came to rest where she needed them. The leaves still quivered. If she had not done this before, if she had not run the greencraft through this wood so many times that it was half a witch’s instrument on its own, it would have been impossible in her current weariness. But like an old friend, the tree was kind to her. Dizzy and panting, she reached for the bough overhead and brought her knee up on the windowsill. Then, in no state at all to be trusting her life to her balance and an unsteady length of branch, she crept out of the window and did just that.
The world swung around her as she grasped the tree, unwilling to move her feet for several long moments. Then, out of sheer mindlessness, she began to climb downwards. The darkness made it difficult to find her handholds, but it also mercifully hid the height of the drop below. She was nearly at the base of the tree when a distant crash splintered the air. She clung to the trunk, one foot losing purchase, and for a wild instant thought that the tree beneath her had cracked in two before she remembered—the gate. Her pulse quickened in her throat. If the gate had given way, surely all the king’s men would be called to it, with no attention to spare for one small figure creeping down a tree. A prayer to the Mother floating through her head, she found the lowest branch with her boots and finally half-slid, half-leapt to the ground.
She recovered from a stumble and bolted for the line of trees. There were no torches drawing near, no shouts from behind her. The woods swallowed her up, and she was alone in the darkness with the pounding of her feet and the fear beating in her head, driving her on.
It did not matter, she told herself. Neither a keepsafe charm nor the silent prayer to the Mother she had woven it with could help her now. But panic bubbled up in her throat, and she struggled to keep from making a noise. She had to know what was happening. They could see nothing in this room, small and close and lined with tapestries and rugs, as though that could keep out the siege like the winter cold. The tower room had once been her retreat, and it was now her cell.
She threw her head back and surged to her feet. The ladymaids and Emaris, the old chatelaine, watched her move across the room as though she were a serpent that might turn on them. Even Emaris had given up her pretense of needlework, and sat with her hands folded and her white, starchy face staring out of her wimple. They were all waiting interminably for the horror to be over, or for the horror to come to them and break down their door.
The king’s men might harm the chatelaine and her maids, but they were not hunting for them. They were hunting for a witch.
Vivaine fed the wreath to the fireplace, gripping the mantel to steady herself. She turned to the window. The shutters were bolted tight, but through them they could all hear a distant howl of voices and clanging steel, and the smell of smoke in the night air. The town had been burning since the morning. Vivaine wrestled with the shutter-bolt with shaking fingers. She heard the creak of brigandine armor behind her as the guardsman at the door moved.
“We’d do best to keep that shut, milady,” came Dalton’s gruff voice. She did not turn around for worry of what he might see in her face.
“Let me look out for a moment, for mercy’s sake,” she snapped at him. The bolt slid free and she pulled the shutters open, breathing in a gasp of cool air and smoke. The noise grew louder in her ears. The battle was distant and shadowy, lit only by torches and the smoldering ruins of the town. It was like seeing shadows move in a nightmare, imps crawling far below. Did the king’s soldiers not need sleep, like hounds crazed by the hunt? It came to her that they must be close to overtaking the castle to press on through the night like this. She shuddered, and tried to fix her eyes on the gates. They were still standing. She could see the press of Greylake men, some of them in blue and silver, and the great oak-timbers that they braced the gates with. There came another terrible crack, and a ripple of impact through the men. The king’s men had a battering ram. There was fighting on the battlements. And beyond that, in the darkness, grey ranks glinting with steel and campfires burning as far as the shores of the Lake...
“Keep it shut,” Dalton repeated, more harshly. “Before a lit arrow comes in. They have burned the stables and half the garrison down.”
Vivaine slowly pulled the shutters closed and locked them, her heart beating in her throat. She could have scried and seen the battle more clearly, but she did not want to know what water and crystal would show her now. This isolation had its mercies. She retreated to her chair and found one of the maids, Marienne, staring at her with fearful blue eyes. “The gates are holding,” Vivaine said quietly. Dalton was silent. She forced herself to look at him, at the way the firelight gleamed on the leather-and-steel hilt of the sword sheathed at his side. There were two other men-at-arms on the stair, but Dalton Bloodhind, favored among Reult’s men, was guarding against what lay within the tower.
Did he think that she might fling herself from the window? Or was it another kind of madness he feared? It was telling that, even with the king’s army at their gates, she and her powers were still a threat to Greylake.
She cleared her throat. “Is there any word from Armais or Longmere...?”
The guardsman’s short, brusque “No milady” told her all she needed to know. She had never shared Reult’s surety about the northern dukes. Talk of new loyalties and new powers in the kingdom had begun to fade once the young prince-king in Lyonsmouth had seized control of the throne and sent his men marching north with orders to burn dissent from the duchies. The silence that followed her question was heavy with unspoken despair. Vivaine tried to break it.
“Let me go out and see if I can help,” she ventured. “I could heal . . .” As soon as it was spoken she knew the folly of that idea. Very few of the men would let her touch them, much less work witchcraft on them as they lay bleeding.
Dalton Bloodhind looked at her, his face stony. She was lucky that he would even speak to her. He crossed his arms and settled himself more firmly before the door, the metal of his armor and weapons clinking. “You are safest here, milady.” After a pause, he said stiffly, “You can do your work from here.”
Vivaine glanced down at her hands. She had already worked what she could, and paced across the floorboards of her workroom so many times that she could not stand to be in there any longer. The wards had sent her down to the walls of Greylake with chalice and chimes, where the villeins stared at her and murmured prayers to the Mother. But she had felt the wards break early this morning. When a man set his will to something, little could stop him, and when thousands of men set their wills to the destruction of Greylake, what could a few stretched-thin spells of protection hope to do?
This was far, far beyond her. The convent had taught her to pray, to charm, and to heal. The Sisters had not taught her anything of war. She was no sorceress, but she was the closest thing to one that Reult had been able to find. No number of beautiful grimoires or instruments, bought with her husband’s coin and cunning, could turn one woman into a powerful Circle of witches. Mother help her, she had lied to him sometimes about what she could do, when it was something passing unseen, but only to appease him...
Boots thudded on the stair. She jerked upright where she sat, and Dalton drew an inch of steel, staring through the barred grate in the door. One of the maids whimpered. The soldiers couldn’t have breached the keep yet, could they? Abruptly, Dalton shoved the iron latch back and the door skidded open, and one of the men-at-arms stopped dead in the doorway. Beads of sweat were rolling down his pockmarked face, and there was something dark smeared across his tunic. Was it soot or blood?
“His Grace is wounded,” he croaked. “Badly.” His jaw hung open as though he were going to say something else, but nothing came.
“Where is he, Ger?” Dalton snapped, but Vivaine was already pushing past them, into the landing, running for the door to her workroom on the other side. Inside, the curving room blazed with candlelight against shuttered windows. She brushed past hanging garlands of herbs, snatching her rowan wand from its crux, seizing a gilded chalice from the Mother’s altar and dashing the left-over dregs onto the floor. Bloodroot, wyvern’s tongue... Her hands fumbled over the phials on her herbiary shelves, gathering up the most potent.
Nothing else she could take would be more precious than time. Her instruments bundled under her arm, she darted outside again. “Take me to him,” she said, and her voice sounded firmer, hasher, than she felt. They pounded down the spiraling stairs, Ger’s ragged breathing echoing in the closeness of the tower. The rim of the chalice dug into her ribs. “What happened?” she demanded.
“One of the king’s dogs got a spear under his armor. Piked His Grace like a footsoldier.”
She felt sick. An image of the keepsafe charm snapping in her hands lit up before her, and she almost stumbled. Had it been at that moment that—
There was something at the foot of the stair, beside the doorway, a hunched shape. Bona the Crone. Horrified, Vivaine saw that the hedgewitch held a bowl of dark, glistening blood in her lap, and a motionless mass of feathers lay beside her. Hen’s blood or not, to call upon such magic here... “What are you doing?!” she cried, anger rushing through her with such vicious force that she was surprised by it. Bona’s pale eyes turned up towards her.
“The augury—” Bona began, in her thin, high voice.
“How dare you work bloodcraft in my tower!” Her hands were shaking with fury. “Men are dying and you are poisoning the Veil with—with this!”
“My lady,” came the man-at-arm’s uncertain interruption. She had no time for Bona, and no power to spare to stop her.
“I hope you are haunted on your deathbed by the souls of these men!” she snarled, and burst through the door, gathering her skirt as she ran down the narrow hallway through the duchess’s quarters. The roar of the battle was louder here, like a monster stalking through stone walls. The heat of her anger turned to cold sweat again.
In the dim, vaulted space of the entrance hall, she saw a crowd of figures in armor and leather: men-at-arms, page boys, and servants gathered like worshippers on a Chantry frieze. There was grime and blood everywhere, every tunic a butcher’s apron. The great door in its carven arch was barricaded with lumber and nails and waiting for the battering ram.
She craned her neck but could see nothing as she approached, until she drew near enough and the men noticed her. Then they pulled back, recoiled far enough for her to see her husband.
They’d put him on one of the stone benches. His armor had been silver-bright this morning, and now it was dull with dust and dented over his breast. Below his waist, fresh, bright blood leaked in rivulets over his tassets. Bile surged in her throat, and she bit her cheek to fight it back.
Reult was still awake, and hissing insults at Guard Captain Jehann from between gritted teeth as the man tried to get him to drink from a cup of water. Vivaine knelt beside him, her fingers on the straps of his armor before she dared to look into his eyes. “Help me get his breastplate off,” she urged the Captain. Reult reached down and grasped her chin, his leather gauntlet scraping against her cheek. She knew the face that he saw—tawny, sharp, framed by waves of black hair—but she did not know if he would love or hate the sight of it now. Reluctantly, she lifted her eyes to his. He was so grey, and his lips were stained red. He looked nothing like himself, almost . . . powerless.
“Don’t waste time,” he spat at her, the muscles in his throat cording with the effort. “Your magic. Why did I keep a witch . . . in Greylake’s tower, if not for this? You will save me. I will have you . . . save me!” His words ended in a low groan, and his hand dropped.
Captain Jehann had managed to work his breastplate free. The wound was through his stomach and bowels, long and deep, and hemorrhaging blood. She could smell the putrefaction. “Hallowed Mother,” she whispered, struggling with a flood of nausea. “Staunch the wound, quick,” she managed to say, and scrabbled for her wand. The guardsman’s hands and stained linen covered the gash again, and as Reult grunted in pain she inhaled, reaching for the Veil.
Power seeped through her, softening the air around her, lifting twining curls from her hair to float as though stirred by the wind. She raised her wand, feeling it resonate with the chords of his flesh. It strained in her guiding hand as she sought to knit off the small blood vessels. But with each little victory, she could still feel the terrible depth of the wound, split deep into his organs. The great blood vessels were out of the reach of her wand, and she could sense the blackening of corruption spreading from his bowels. Was there any possibility of recovering him from this?
She did not dare make an answer to that. All she could do now was work. The filigree of veins twined in her senses like roots, and she bade them grow and seal, flesh creeping slowly after them. But below the the surface of skin and muscle, his inner organs would not respond to her coaxing. They had been too badly damaged. And in that soft darkness blood was leaking from him, pooling in the cavities of his stomach. This could not be healed at once; she had to try and keep him alive.
She cracked her eyes open, feeling the ache of her knees on the flagstones and the stiffness of her neck. Her vision blurred for a moment, and then she focused on Reult. He was still breathing, with slow labor, and his tanned face was ashen. The linen over his stomach was soaked in crimson. “Water,” she asked, and her voice cracked. “Give me water.”
Someone handed her the cup that Reult had drunk from. She set her chalice on the floor and poured the water in. It took her three tries before she could pull the cork from her vial of bloodroot, for her hands were shaking badly. But then it was mixed, and she laced her fingers around the stem of the chalice, calling up her magic again. The chalice began to glow, light shimmering from the gilded bowl as though the red-tinted water was rosy crystal. Sweat beaded on her forehead.
Distantly, she heard Captain Jehann say, “The bleeding has stopped, Your Grace,” and her gaze slid over to see him lift the gory linen, and she heard a gasp at the sight of the wound. It was almost closed, a dark-red line as thin as a hair at the ends but wet and open in a patch at the center. Reult said nothing, but she choked out, “He is still torn inside, and still hemorrhaging.” There was silence.
Vivaine rose up on her knees and bent over her husband with the chalice. “Drink,” she begged, and tried to lift his head. The Captain helped her, and she pressed the cup to Reult’s lips. He drank, and when the tincture was gone his green eyes were open, staring at her. “It is working,” he rasped, his chest heaving for breath with each word. “The pain is gone.”
She nodded, unable to speak for a moment. Then, she managed, “My lord, you know that . . . I cannot heal a mortal wound.”
His hand tightened on her skirts, and a glimpse of his old vitality flared in his eyes, though now it only made him look feverish. “You have failed me as a woman,” he said from between clenched teeth. “Will you fail me now . . . as a witch, when I need you most?” Breath was rattling in his chest. “What good, then, is a wife?”
“I am doing everything that I can,” she whispered, turning away from him. Her wand was in her hand again, and she hunched over him, pressing her fingertips against his stained skin. The rowan wand radiated with magic, but his body would not respond. She realized now how far gone he was, even with her draught, and how exhausted she had become. She strained, drawing deeper into the Veil, but it seemed as though she could gather up nothing more. Something was wrong—or was it only hubris, thinking that she was capable of more than this?
Time hung still and stretched out as she fought within him and within herself, but gained no ground. In the darkness behind her eyelids, she heard Reult’s voice in a whisper, close by and yet so far away. She could not tell if he spoke to her or to another. “Please. I am so tired.”
And then in the next slow moments, his chest fell under her hand and did not rise again. She felt his blood stop in its courses.
“No,” she murmured, but the word hardly made it past her lips. She opened her eyes and looked for him. All the lines of hostility had been smoothed from his face. A glimmer of green iris showed between his lids, but he was blind now. Numb, she reached out and brushed a dark curl from his forehead, as she had done when she was a girl and still in love with him.
An arm in chainmail obscured her vision as Captain Jehann bent over him. “He is dead,” he pronounced, and the words echoed strangely in her ears. She rocked back on her heels, and the wand clattered from her slack grip, rolling under the bench.
“We’ll keep the word from the men as long as possible,” the Captain was saying grimly. “We fight for our freedom until the walls fall. He would have wanted it. His last orders—”
“No,” another voice broke in, deeper and rougher. One of the quartermasters. “What choice do we have now but surrender? The madness ends now. Surrender, and we save the lives of hundreds.“
Murmurs of agreement rose around her, from the circle of men staring down on their dead liege lord.
Vivaine swayed on her knees, unable to look up. She was a widow now, and a witch without a protector. Her own death would not be quiet, but pass in a blaze of fire and screaming. None of the men around her would be sorry to see her go to the stake; in their eyes, she had always been a curse upon the duke, from the moment she ensnared him in the convent at Rauen. It would have looked better if she could manage tears now, but her eyes were dry. The king’s men might have mercy if they surrendered the witch . . .
She lunged to her feet and stumbled out of the crowd. Someone’s hand brushed her arm, but no one stopped her, no one called out to seize her. Awash with dizziness, she made it across the hall—but in the archway stood Bona. Her graying hair was awry and eyes were wide.
“Open your wings and fly, my lady,” she crowed, reaching for her. “Fly!”
Vivaine recoiled, cracking her shoulder on the wall as she fled the hedgewitch’s mad laughter. The shadowy hallway to her quarters swallowed her up again. She reached her bedchamber and slammed the door behind her. Inside, the only light was the fire burning down in the grate. Vivaine’s knees buckled and she sat down on the edge of her bed. Her breathing was high and fast in her own ears.
She was no longer welcome here, if she had ever been. The siege would be broken soon. Flight was her only choice; she had to get out of the castle and away from the king’s soldiers and the fire they left in their wake.
Though she had run deeper into the warren of the castle, she would not be cornered here. Bona could not know this, but perhaps in her madness she had guessed that Vivaine had a way to escape these walls. No wings, only the power of her own hands.
She had made some small preparations, and now they seemed like the things a child might do before an outing. Not enough for what faced her. The chance that these walls might crumble had never seemed real to her until now. All she had was a knapsack hidden in her wardrobe, packed with some traveler’s rations and her woodswoman’s kit, which she took with her when riding out into the forest in search of herbs for her craft, and solitude. And laid out upon her broadchest were five small objects, humble enough to be mistaken for an innocent crafter’s work, but all older than she was and steeped in magic. A simple cup of aged silver for the sigil of the Waters; a round, river-polished bloodstone for the sigil of Stone; a lacquered reed pipe for the sigil of the Winds; an etched steel fire-striker for the sigil of the Sun and Moon; and a slim dark wand of witch hazel, slightly crooked and knotted so that it might have been only a twig, for her own sigil of the Greenwood.
An instrument for all five points of the Circle, and yet as she tucked them into her knapsack with shaking fingers, it seemed as though she needed so much more. She would rather have a blazing sword and a golden wand right now, than face the howling world outside with these trinkets. But grand relics could not save her; unassuming instruments might allow her to work her craft undetected. If she made it past the army outside.
Fleeing in a velvet gown, likewise, would do her no good. She tore through the laces of her gown and reached for her riding clothes. The moss-green dress was plain enough for a villein’s daughter, and if the oilskin cloak lined with rabbit fur might be more suspicious, it was also invaluable. She knew from experience that it was warm enough to spend a night in the wild with. It was the Vineyard Moon, and the weather was still mild, but it would grow colder. Her mind was clearing with these practical concerns, but she could not help but listen for pounding on her door. They would come for her soon, surely.
Her purse was hidden behind the loose stone in the fireplace and she pried it free now, glancing within. Silver coronets and copper glinted at her, with the lonely faces of two gold crowns. Reult rarely gave her coin, but she had managed to save up this much. Not enough to keep her for long, but it was some comfort that the purse itself was spelled against thieves’ notice, painstakingly woven from the craft and castoff silk by Sister Inavessa. She unclasped from around her neck the thin chain that held her marriage token, a glitter of sapphire fragments set in silver around one small pale diamond. It was no duchess’s dowry, but it was the most costly thing she had. She slid chain and token into her purse, and pushed it deep into the pocket of her riding dress.
There was no more time to stand and think. She fastened her cloak and shouldered the knapsack, and went not to the door, but to the window.
Unbolting the shutters, she eased them open. Outside, shouts and crashes drummed through the dark sky, the stars obscured by a haze of smoke. Her quarters lay in the rear of the castle, where the wall fell away in a curtain of stone to the slope below, and the ground tumbled to the sprawl of woods behind the castle. It was a poor approach for an attack, a face of the castle with more arrow-slits than windows. She was relieved but not surprised to see no lights or movement in the dark forest below. No—two torches bobbing near the eastern tower, in opposite orbits of patrol. She could not see if there were sentries on the ramparts above her.
But it was clearer than she could have hoped. Vivaine took a deep breath, feeling the sweat cool on her brow. There was a tree that grew near the base of the wall, a crooked, hardy black walnut tree, so tall that its branches brushed the stones a few feet below her window. It had not always been so tall, nor so crooked. Many times over the past six years, she had used it as a means of escape from her bedchamber, most often to go out herb-picking without having to beg her leave of the guards and pass through the stares of every villein in the town. More than once she had used it to escape Reult’s temper, after he had ordered the latch-bolt removed from the inside of her door and fastened on the outside instead. But every time, she had returned to the castle eventually. Not this time.
She took out her wand and braced her hand against the masonry. She had the strength for this last spell; she had to. This was not the strange and gory inner workings of the body, but the solid, green, and simple magic of trees. She closed her eyes, and opened her heart to the Veil. Fickle power, it swam away from her like the stars in the smoky sky. Concentrating, she just grasped it and channeled her will into the wand, reaching out towards the black walnut tree. And slowly, creakily, the tree reached back.
Sweat was dripping from her chin when the branches finally came to rest where she needed them. The leaves still quivered. If she had not done this before, if she had not run the greencraft through this wood so many times that it was half a witch’s instrument on its own, it would have been impossible in her current weariness. But like an old friend, the tree was kind to her. Dizzy and panting, she reached for the bough overhead and brought her knee up on the windowsill. Then, in no state at all to be trusting her life to her balance and an unsteady length of branch, she crept out of the window and did just that.
The world swung around her as she grasped the tree, unwilling to move her feet for several long moments. Then, out of sheer mindlessness, she began to climb downwards. The darkness made it difficult to find her handholds, but it also mercifully hid the height of the drop below. She was nearly at the base of the tree when a distant crash splintered the air. She clung to the trunk, one foot losing purchase, and for a wild instant thought that the tree beneath her had cracked in two before she remembered—the gate. Her pulse quickened in her throat. If the gate had given way, surely all the king’s men would be called to it, with no attention to spare for one small figure creeping down a tree. A prayer to the Mother floating through her head, she found the lowest branch with her boots and finally half-slid, half-leapt to the ground.
She recovered from a stumble and bolted for the line of trees. There were no torches drawing near, no shouts from behind her. The woods swallowed her up, and she was alone in the darkness with the pounding of her feet and the fear beating in her head, driving her on.
