Sons of the Falcon (The Falcons Saga) (51 page)

“No! Run!” Jaedren screamed, but
the townspeople were too far away to hear him. Thorn never said the ogres would
attack Ilswythe’s shopkeepers, shepherds, and farmers, only that he was to mark
which way they went. They dispersed through town swinging those axes, and
humans collapsed amid red ruin. Young or old, man or woman, the ogres didn’t
care. Their axes were hungry and they bit deep. Even those inside houses
weren’t safe. Ogres shouldered the doors aside as if they were made of kindling
and ducked under the lintels. The miller ran out of the mill wielding an axe of
his own, but he didn’t get the chance to swing it before an ogre opened his bowels.
The mule pulling the two-wheeled cart bolted straight toward the river, turned
too late, and sent the cart skidding down the bank. The heavy load dragged the
mule down into the floodwater. Jaedren watched a woman in a yellow dress run
across the Highway reaching for a man in muddy boots, but an axe lodged under
his ribs and he spewed blood and fell at her feet. Shrieking, she turned and
fled straight into the arc of a second axe that hewed off her head. They
couldn’t see which way to run. Two little girls running hand in hand fled
straight into a line of axes.

Jaedren didn’t want to see either.
He let go of his Veil Sight, hoping the horrors would diminish, but he was
wrong. People he thought might get away across this field or through that
orchard suddenly fell and the ground under them turned red. It was better if he
knew where the ogres were, so he would know when to look away.

Maegeth was calling the garrison to
arms. Archers raced up the wallwalk, poured from the gatehouse towers, and
lined the southern battlements. A sentry in the courtyard demanded to know if
he ought to shut the castle gate. A few townspeople dared the flooded ford,
trying to reach the safety of the fortress. The churning waters reached past
their waists, slowing them down. A man carried a little girl on his shoulders
and a baby in his arms. A woman lost her footing and was swept downstream. A
boy jumped in after her, hands reaching to haul her back, but the waters swept
him away too. The woman managed to catch hold of a tree limb and drag herself
onto the bank, but the boy kept going. He went under once, twice, and didn’t
come up again. The woman screamed his name, but it didn’t help.

“Run!” Jaedren called again,
beckoning wildly with his arm for them to hurry. The little girl on the man’s
shoulders looked up and saw him. Maybe two dozen people made it across the
ford, but the ogres followed right behind them. The water climbed as high as
their muscled thighs, troubling them not at all. A man with a gray beard shoved
two children up the bank ahead of him, then fell with an axe in his back. The
ogres pursuing them brayed, driving them, taking pleasure in the terror of
their quarry. The man carrying the girl and the baby scrabbled up the hill and
collapsed inside the gate, panting, and hugged his children tight. A handful of
others followed him in, screaming for family they left behind. A youth turned
back. Jaedren saw him dash out the gate again and run toward the ford calling,
“Matty?” He died with the name on his tongue. Red. Red on the wind, red in the
water, red on the road.

The open gate screamed an invitation.
The half dozen ogres who’d crossed the river hefted axes dripping purple blood
and charged the fortress. If even this few got inside.… The wounded graybeard
on the riverbank was trying to crawl to safety, but they couldn’t wait for him.
“Close the portcullis!” Jaedren shouted. “Close it now! Close it, close it!”
Please
listen to me
.

Someone must’ve thought it a good
idea, because the chains rattled and the iron grate came crashing down.

Jaedren raced down the wallwalk and
around the bulging belly of the tower and into the shadow of the gate. The six
ogres bashed against the portcullis with the axes, their shoulders, even their
helmeted heads, but the iron held fast.

Maegeth hurried past. “Your Grace,
please go back inside.”

“What is going on?” Rhoslyn demanded.
She stood in the middle of the courtyard in a sparkling evening gown. Lura
waited on the steps behind her, mouth open at the sight of bleeding, sobbing
townspeople and arming soldiers.

“Ilswythe is under attack.” Maegeth
sounded irritated with the duchess’s lack of obedience.

“But—” Rhoslyn found Jaedren among
the roiling surge of soldiers and waved him to her. Fear widened her hazel
eyes. “Is this what Thorn was worried about?”

He nodded, found that he was
shaking and gasping uncontrollably. His lips tingled, but he couldn’t stop
gasping. Red on the wind, red on the road.

The duchess’s hands squeezed his
shoulders; her eyes bored into him. “Breathe slow and calm. Brave. We need you to
be brave, Jaedren. We have to keep our heads. What would Kelyn have us do?
Huh?”

Red on the wind. “I don’t know,” he
sobbed. “The archers can’t see them to shoot them.”

“Archers? Good. You can tell them
where to aim, yes?”

He nodded again. His breathing was
slower now. The black spots cleared from his eyes.

“All right, you tell them. Maegeth,
watch him. We’ll see to these people. Lura! Help me change.”

She bustled off, sweeping up a
river-soaked child as she went. The townspeople followed her into the keep.
Jaedren felt better now. He was a knight-in-training, he reminded himself, not
some panicky pigherder. He ran after Maegeth, up the wallwalk and onto the
battlements.

Three companies of ogres finally
finished pouring over the hill and ranged out across the fields on the far side
of town. The flag-bearer planted the banner beside the town well. Two
washerwomen lay beneath it, their wet laundry strewn over the ground. The rider
of the black horse had advanced through town and lounged almost leisurely in
the saddle on the far bank. Only this morning Jaedren had asked Etivva if she’d
ever seen an elf. The irony made him want to cry. Thorn said elves were good.
Why was this one leading an attack on Ilswythe?

The elf ordered one of the
companies forward. The ogres crossed the Avidan, clustering tight behind raised
shields. They were soon well within range, but Ilswythe’s archers squinted down
at nothing more than a muddy foot-pocked road, and their arrows remained in
their quivers. “Shoot them!” Jaedren ran down the lines of archers, shaking the
men and women by their arms. “Shoot them! Look for the new tracks they make in
the mud! Captain, tell them!”

Maegeth bellowed, “Archers, nock
arrows!”

“There, there! Climbing the hill!”
Jaedren jabbed a finger through the crenels, hopping up and down.

“Aim! Loose!”

Two dozen arrows took flight, all
aimed in the same direction. Three ogres suddenly appeared, their power over
the Veil lost with their lives, and fell hard to the ground. Arrows made them
look like pincushions. Others brayed in pain, but only Jaedren saw them tear
the arrows from their flesh and keep marching in formation.

“We got ‘em!” cried an archer.

“What the hell are those things?”

Jaedren called to anyone who would
listen, “There are hundreds of them. Keep it up!”

Ogres shrieked and collapsed under
the onslaught of arrows, but their shields were wide and thick. Massive arms
held them high in a shell formation, and most won their way to the gate. Only
from directly above them could Jaedren see that inside the barrier of shields,
the ogres carried an iron-banded tree trunk. “Battering ram!” he shouted. The
thudding began at once. It was a thunder that jarred Jaedren’s teeth and
thumped his hands from the wall.

“Shut the inner doors,” Maegeth
ordered. “Remember the padding. This isn’t a drill, people! Nock! Loose!
Straight down the wall, idiot. Use your damn ears. Do we have archers manning
the murder holes? You and you, go!”

On the far side of the river, the
horn blasted a short note and a second company started across the ford. The
ogre wearing the plate armor led them along the riverbank, taking a wide path
around the base of the castle, just beyond bowshot. “Aster, where are they
going?”

“Ilswythe has two gates, love,” she
said.

“Captain!” he cried, pointing. “A
second ram. They’re going for the north gate.”

Maegeth dispatched half the
garrison to meet the threat. Jaedren couldn’t be in two places at once. How was
he to help the soldiers at both gates?

“You have to flee, love,” Aster
said. Her smile was so sad.

“Flee? But I need to—”

“If the naenion break in, they will
take you like they took the others.”

Jaedren remembered his dream about
the raven-haired girl. The green men had killed her, he was more certain than
ever. “No! No, I can’t. Kelyn wouldn’t flee. He’d stay and fight. So will I.”
If only he was older. The sword in his belt would be a real one, with a razor
sharp edge and a name to make him feel bold.

All too soon the second ram started
knocking at the north gate. A distant cheer came from the archers there; they
must have killed an ogre.

The duchess emerged from the keep,
this time wearing a sensible woolen day dress. Etivva joined her, limping on
her wooden foot. They climbed the wallwalk to have a look for themselves.
Rhoslyn’s hand jumped to her mouth when she saw the village. Bodies littered
the streets. Black smoke rose from the mill’s windows. More curled white from
the thatched roof of a cottage. Etivva looked to the skies, lips moving in
silent prayer.

“The villagers are settled in the
Great Hall,” the duchess said, throat tight. “Captain, have you received word
from His Lordship?”

“You would’ve been the first to
know, Your Grace, I’m sorry.”

“Did this invisible enemy make no
ultimatum, no terms for surrender?”

“No, ma’am.”

Rhoslyn’s nod was slow and heavy,
like one fighting dizziness. “Will they break through?”

Maegeth took her time answering.
“We’ll hold them as best we can, for as long as we can. If the Goddess is good,
Lord Kelyn will return, see we’re in trouble, let the king know, and raise the
militias. If we can hold out until then, we’ll be all right. Our stores are
full. If Valryk had informed us sooner that he meant to move the Assembly, that
wouldn’t be the case.”

Etivva’s prayer ended suddenly. She
glanced down at Jaedren and placed a hand tenderly under his chin. Her smile
crinkled the crescent-shaped scars on her cheek. “We cannot fight this army.
Can we?”

Jaedren’s eyes burned with rising
tears. “Aster says we have to flee.”

“Out into the open?” Rhoslyn shook
her head, not liking that idea. “Both gates are besieged. How would we get out?
Kelyn never mentioned Ilswythe having tunnels.”

Maegeth shifted feet, uneasy. “It
does. Or, well, it did. I’m not sure anymore.”

“Explain, Captain,” Rhoslyn
demanded. The gates shuddered under the hammering of the rams. Bowstrings
twanged. Ogres roared. The stink of rotting meat wafted over the walls.

“The tunnels haven’t been used in
two hundred years, Your Grace, not since Tallon’s rebellion. They may have
collapsed by now. I don’t know if the doors at the far end are even workable.
There was no need—”

“The safety of this fortress and
its people has been in your hands, Captain! Does Kelyn know of your neglect?
What if one of the lords of the Northwest began to think of himself as another
Tallon? What if the Fierans had overrun Aralorr during the last war? No need?”

“Your Grace, I’m sure—”

“We don’t have time for this.
Collapsed or not, we have to try. We have to get the household and their
families out of here. If we win through, you won’t have to worry about the
extra mouths to feed. We’ll raise the militias ourselves and get word to
Bramoran.”

Maegeth beckoned to two of her
sergeants, both of them older men who had served His Lordship and his father
before him. “Angson, Nael, you know the tunnels? Your job is to escort Her
Grace safely through, whatever it takes.”

“We’ll need shovels, no doubt,”
said the one called Angson, a beefy man-at-arms with a beard long enough to
tuck into his belt. Nael, skinny and pox-scarred, agreed with a nod and a
grunt.

“Get them and anything else you
might need. Plenty of food. Lanterns and oil. If you come to a block you can’t dig
through, stay down there until I announce the all-clear.”

Rhoslyn recruited Etivva and
Jaedren to help her round up the household and order them to gather at the main
gatehouse. Several of the scullery maids and washerwomen fought the order. “I’m
not going into the gatehouse. That gate could break down any minute,” said a
woman drawing at the well, “I’ll stay right ‘ere and see to me duty. Somebody’s
got to stitch up the wounded, eh?” Some of the footmen doffed their fine
livery, deciding to take up bows on the wall instead; others said to hell with
that, they were getting out. Nelda refused to leave her kitchen under any
circumstances. “I will see that our soldiers are fed.” She made sure each man,
woman, and child had bread and cheese enough for three days. As she tied the
sackcloth around each bundle of food, she tucked apples and cakes into those
that went to the youngsters. The smith kept pouring hot iron into arrowhead
molds while his assistants learned from the fletcher how to assemble arrows quickly.
No one asked them to flee into the tunnels, and they didn’t bother leaving the
smithy.

The portcullis rattled with each
strike of the ram. If the iron grate gave way, the ogres still had the bronze-banded
oaken doors to contend with. Captain Maegeth beckoned for the duchess and her
household at the door of the guardroom. The ledger table and watchman’s desk
had been swept aside; a square door had been raised up from the floor. A
ladder, not a stair, descended into darkness. Jaedren stared at that dark hole
like it was a mouth waiting to swallow him whole. “Angson and Nael have already
headed down,” Maegeth said. “When you get to the bottom, Your Grace, you’ll see
a path to the left and another to the right. The right-hand path comes out in
the town hall on the square, so you’ll want to turn left. That will take you
north. It’s at least two miles of tunnel, but if it’s clear you’ll surface in
the livery of Bransdon village. Here, take a lantern. Flint and iron are
attached to the chain. Goddess go with you. Jaedren?” Maegeth pushed a lantern
into his hand as well and nudged him toward that gaping throat. Down he went,
one-handed, his lantern lighting a musty, nitre-coated wall to each side, the
rung below his feet, the top of Rhoslyn’s head below that, and nothing else. He’d
read once that, long ago, men used to bury their dead instead of burn them.
Graves and tombs those holes in the ground were called, and the old tales said
they stank of dust and bone and cold, ancient death. He supposed the smell of
these tunnels was what those tales meant.