On the castle parapet, Lyram lowered the eyeglass and frowned. Beyond the ruined, outer wall of the keep, the terrain turned to densely wooded hills and then into mountains, but that much dust meant men and horses, and lots of them. No merchant caravans came past the remote Caisteal Aingeal, and he expected no supply train until the spring thaw reached the mountain passes, which would be two weeks or more. He turned to his aide-de-camp.
“Have any of the scouts returned yet?” The stiff wind whipped the words from his mouth and his auburn hair into his eyes.
Everard stood straight and stiff alongside him, impeccable in formal court jacket and kilt marked with the insignia of his rank. Before he could answer, a shout rose from further down the castle wall. A soldier pointed at the old gate.
Lyram pressed the glass back to his eye and swung to look, his basket-hilted broadsword banging against his leg at the sudden motion. With no trouble over the winter, and no reason to expect any, he wore only his gambeson and a leather tabard. The rest of his armour remained in his room—a lack that left him distinctly uneasy now.
A horse raced through the crumbling gate in the old vine- and grass-covered outer wall, the rider clinging to its neck. It galloped up the narrow dirt path that cut straight from outer gate to moat. This close to the tail end of winter, no cattle grazed in the waist-high grass between the two walls.
A hushed stillness spread along the soldiers lining the battlements. Tension squeezed a tight knot into Lyram’s gut. Nearly twelve months he’d waited here in exile, twelve months wondering if Drault would be true to his word—if he dared.
Now it began.
“Open the gates.” Lyram spun towards the gate-tower stairwell and hastened down the spiral steps to the triangular courtyard.
As he stepped from the darkness of the stairwell, the sound of hoof beats on timber echoed off the walls. After a long moment, the horse burst from the shadows of the barbican and clattered onto the cobbles of the inner courtyard, sweat-darkened chestnut flanks heaving and its rider half-hanging from the saddle. Lyram rushed forward, caught the falling man, and lowered him to the ground.
Everard appeared at his side, his glasses pushed hard to the bridge of his nose and lips pursed. A ring of faces pressed around them, the soldiers’ brows creased beneath their helms.
Galdron shoved through, helm in hand and the sun gleaming on his balding pate, and the soldiers fell back to allow their captain passage. He squatted alongside Lyram with a cursory “sir”.
Lyram eased the man from his grasp and onto his back on the cobbles. He sucked in a breath. Maddok. Though the young man was a farmer’s son, and Lyram was a duke’s, they’d known each other since boyhood and even played together a time or two. Blood slicked the partial cuir bouilli chest and shoulder harness he wore over his chainmail, its metallic stink filling Lyram’s nostrils. A crossbow quarrel had punched through the mail where the boiled leather plate ended and stood upright in Maddok’s chest, buried almost to the fletching.
Lyram met Galdron’s eyes, and the grizzled captain shook his head slightly. No rib had stopped that arrow from going in, only coming out. No doubt the arrowhead pierced the lung. Lyram closed his eyes momentarily and took a steadying breath. There was nothing to do except ease the lad’s passing to Ahura.
Everard handed a waterskin to Galdron, who lifted it to the scout’s lips.
Maddok sucked greedily, and water leaked down his chin. Sweat plastered thin blond hair to his skull.
“Sir?” The scout’s eyes fluttered open, seeking and holding Lyram’s gaze. “Sir.” Relief stained the words this time. “An army, commander. An army comes.”
“What? Here?” Lyram scooted closer, taking Maddok’s hand. “Stupid question. Of course here. There’s nothing else for miles except trees and the odd cow.”
His worst fear, an unspoken and foolish fear, was that an army raised that dust cloud. And yet why should there be an army here? Though technically part of the Borders, Caisteal Aingeal was some thirty leagues from the official boundary between kingdoms, and miles more to the nearest of the fortified keeps. This remote castle, built around a small shrine of Ahura, the goddess of death, truth and justice, contained nothing of value or interest.
Nothing except me.
Prince Drault would not use an army though, would he? Not inside his own father’s kingdom? He could never hope to get away with such audacity.
Lyram shook himself, as though to rid himself of surprise. “Report, please, Maddok.”
He surveyed the castle as he listened to the report, his eyes cataloguing fortifications. The knot tightened in his stomach with each passing word. Maddok paused intermittently to gasp through the pain. He was dying, and most likely more would die in days to come, men Lyram had known all his life. But Maddok was young, so very young, and though Lyram had lost men before, he hated it each and every time.
“Two thousand men?” Despite his best efforts, disbelief tinged Lyram’s words as Maddok’s report rolled to a close. A tiny castle, Caisteal Aingeal’s full strength was a barracks of a mere hundred soldiers. Currently, his own guard bolstered the permanent contingent to twice that. After the king dismissed him, they’d been loyal enough to follow him into exile, far from home and court, but had their loyalty brought them only to certain death? It seemed so, in the face of such overwhelming odds.
Drault is behind this. He insisted I be exiled, and he’s behind this, too—somehow.
He shunted the memory aside and pulled a half-empty whisky flask from his belt, but before he took a draught, Everard plucked it from his grasp.
“Not where the men can see.” His aide stuffed the bottle in his sporran.
“Near enough two thousand.” Maddok coughed, and bright, red blood flecked his lips. “Near as I could count. Sir... they fly the gyrfalcon of Velena.”
A murmur ran through the watching soldiers, and Galdron actually spit on the cobbles. “Velenese bastards,” the captain muttered through his ginger beard.
The interminable border wars between Ahlleyn and Velena had only recently come to a close, and some of these men had been with Lyram at the Siege of Invergahr, which started the uneasy peace. A great many more had died there.
“An invasion?” If he could snatch the words back, he would. Persuading Everard and Galdron this was directed at Lyram personally would be hard enough without offering up the convenient explanation of a Velenese invasion. Drault must be behind this army, somehow, someway, even though it made no sense. But an invasion made no sense either—there were more lucrative targets closer to the border than Caisteal Aingeal.
Maddok’s breathing grew more laboured, and fresh blood stained his lips.
Lyram clenched his jaw so hard his teeth hurt. Not the first, and not the last. Hold it together, man.
“Right flags,” the scout murmured, so softly that Lyram had to lean closer, his ear to Maddok’s lips. “But they looked to me like... like Gallowglaighs.” He drew in a deep, rattling breath.
“Anyone could have hired the Gallowglaighs,” Everard said behind him.
“Gallowglaighs are led by Sayella,” Galdron replied. “She could be doing it for patriotism or it could be her daddy paying her men’s wages. That brings it back to Velena.”
“The earl never acknowledged her,” Everard said. “And she hates him for it.”
Galdron grunted. “You have a point. I heard she wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.”
“I heard she told him so. Loudly.”
Lyram waved their half-bantering debate to silence, waiting, but Maddok didn’t speak again. When he drew back, the scout’s eyes were fixed and staring.
He snatched the waterskin from Everard and flung it across the courtyard, scattering the soldiers, and then dropped his face into his hands. No tears pricked his eyes—after all those he’d shed for Zaheva, it sometimes seemed he had no tears left to cry. A waste, a god-damned waste: Zaheva, and Maddok, and every other life lost in the Border Wars. And how many more to come? Ahura would drink her fill here long before the crows came. Worried faces peered at him over shoulders as men scurried for their posts.
Across the courtyard, two women shrouded in loose black robes emerged from the well room, which also housed the stairwell to the catacombs, and crossed the cobbles. They knelt beside the body and, in unison, made the sign of the goddess, touching their brow, lips and breasts, to signify the mind, the breath and the heart of the departed, all of which eased in death. Heads bent, they began the ritual prayers of passing.
One of them, her face lost in the shadows of her deep cowl, glanced at Lyram, and he shivered as the chill gaze of death brushed against him.
She touched her hand to brow, lips and heart again.
“An ill omen,” Everard murmured, staring at the priestesses of death. Stork tall and scrupulously neat, he stood out in his formal kilt and plaid. “For the start of a siege, a worse one is hardly possible, unless we find a company of Ahura’s valkyr or the Battle Priestess herself arrayed with the enemy.”
“Don’t joke.” Lyram rounded on him, his voice rough. “Don’t ever joke about that.”
When the warriors of Ahura picked sides, the choice endorsed one and condemned the other.
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“If the Velenese have broken the treaty,” Galdron said, in an obvious attempt to redirect the conversation, “we’re not prepared, especially not if they strike here first. We’re not equipped to stave off a full assault, but once they neutralise us it’s a clear path to the inner kingdom.”
“Why would Velena invade right now, in the middle of the marriage negotiations?” Lyram stared off into the distance. He only half-listened for the answer to his question, already absorbed in siege preparations. Ten to one odds, and there was so much to do. He needed to check the food stores, the water casks, the inner well, the armoury, the oil supplies... too many things to list. He’d have no chance to recall the cattle herds wintering in the highlands. His eyes lit on the chickens scratching outside the kitchen, near the small garden. They had eggs, and fresh meat, though not much of either. There was more salted and dried meat in the stores.
A small bevy of children kicked a ball near the kitchen door. Did he have time to get them out? What about the women? A castle under siege was no place for them, and the fewer mouths to feed the better, but where would they go? So many problems.
