Page 62

The guardsman came just after nightfall.

“My lord!”

The pounding on the cottage door almost made Ophele drop the teakettle.

“My lord, please, they’re back!”

Remin and Ophele had just been settling into their usual evening of tea, research, and correspondence, and Remin stood up from the table and went to the door at once.

“Who?”

“All of them, my lord.”

The guard must have run all the way from the gatehouse; his bow was half courtesy, and half an attempt to catch his breath.

“Sir Huber, Sir Ortaire, Squire Rollon, and the squires and builders, and a few other folk, all at the gate.

Sir Jinmin is rounding up some more guards so we can open the gate, if it pleases you.”

All of the people that had gone to Ferrede.

Ophele set the kettle down and reached automatically for Remin’s hand, even as he reached for her.

This meant Ferrede must be all right, didn’t it? If Squire Rollon had come back?

“I want to go,”

she breathed, as Remin’s hand squeezed hers almost painfully.

He never said it, but she knew it had worried him terribly to send them, especially as the days went by and they had no word.

“It will be safe, with all your soldiers to guard the gate, won’t it?”

“We’ll come,”

Remin told the guard.

“Go and tell Jinmin we’ll be there directly.”

“My lord. My lady.”

The guard added a quick bow for Ophele and then sprinted back up the road.

“You want me to go, really?”

Ophele asked, casting about for her boots.

It seemed like her duty to go and welcome the men back, and she wouldn’t let fear of the devils keep her from doing it.

She was the Duchess of Andelin.

Remin’s duchess should not be afraid .

“I may send you back.”

Remin warned, stomping into his own boots.

“If I tell you to go back, you are to run straight here.

No arguing, no hesitating, as fast as you can go.”

“I will,”

she promised immediately.

“If you disobey me once, I will never let you do something like this again,”

he said, pulling his breastplate off its stand and meeting her eyes levelly.

“It is that important, little owl.”

That sobered her.

Ophele brought him his gauntlets and helped him put them on.

He meant that if he was in danger, he expected her to leave him behind.

And though part of her instinctively rejected this command, Ophele was too sensible to disobey.

Realistically, all she could do in such a situation was distract him, and maybe even get him hurt. She was not a fighter. She was one that could only listen for the bells.

“I will run if you tell me,”

she promised, her hand lingering on his arm.

“But…will it be so dangerous?”

“I don’t think so, or I wouldn’t let you come in the first place.”

They had a routine now to putting on his armor, briskly managing the clasps and laces and toggles, Ophele hurrying back and forth from the stand with the pieces as Remin strapped them on.

“And I do think it will do everyone good to see you there.

You’re not afraid? It’s all right if you are.”

“No,”

she said stoutly.

Honestly, she didn’t know if she was or not, but she wanted to try.

“You’ll be there.

And devils are just like wolves.

Ugly wolves.”

“That’s right,”

Remin said approvingly, and took her hand.

“Keep up.”

He meant it.

They went up the street at a run with Yvain and Dol racing behind them, and quick on her feet though she was, Ophele could barely keep pace with him, even in armor.

It was a little more than a mile from their home to the gate, and it felt as if her feet barely touched the ground as they joined the flood of people streaming up the road.

“Wait here,”

Remin said, boosting her onto the high front stoop of a workshop near the stables, safely out of the tide of hurrying men.

“If you hear me signal, go home at once.

Yvain, Dol, I am trusting you to keep her safe.”

“We will, m’lord,”

said Dol.

Both guards had already drawn their swords, naked steel at the ready .

“It shouldn’t be necessary,”

Remin said again, reassuring, and lifted a hand.

“Gen! If you please.”

“Be careful, Your Grace,”

Ophele said quickly, and his gloved fingers squeezed hers before he left.

It was very exciting.

Ophele offered a smile to Genon as the herbman climbed onto the workshop stoop beside her, dressed in rugged leather armor that left him mobile enough to use the medical tools in the pack on his back.

She had complete faith that Remin would never endanger her, so she only watched breathlessly as Remin spoke to Sir Jinmin before the gates, the two men towering head and shoulders over everyone else.

“All right, m’lady?”

Genon asked.

“Yes, I’m fine,”

she said, craning her neck.

“Will we actually see a devil, do you think?”

“I certainly hope not,”

he said, with his grimacing smile.

“The faster they get out there, the less likely it is.”

Ophele was surprised to realize she was disappointed by this.

She had been quietly campaigning to be allowed to see the few corpses of the devils collected every morning, either stranglers that had come over the palisade or ghouls too stupid to get out of the sunlight, but so far Remin had refused.

There was no doubt that devils were nearby.

She had never heard them so close before, snarling and slavering, howling wolves both northeast and northwest.

From her work, she knew that the devils were attracted to men and men’s things: lights, buildings, livestock, as if they could smell the domestication on a cow.

Maybe they even hated man-things.

She was half-convinced they weren’t from this world at all, being so entirely outside the natural order. They had never been observed to eat or drink, and so far as anyone knew, they did not even breed like normal beasts. There were no juveniles, and there were no anatomical differences to indicate male or female.

It meant they would certainly seek out the caravan as a man-thing, and beside the great beacon of Tresingale, they would shortly be swarming it.

“Shields!”

Remin’s bellow carried all the way back to her, and all the men ranged outward from the gate lifted them, readying themselves.

They were arrayed in multiple lines, circling outward from the gate, a deep defensive perimeter wherein a devil that smashed through one line of defenders would fall straight onto the spears of the next.

Clapping their helmets onto their heads, Remin and Sir Jinmin pushed open the gates.

She couldn’t see.

Ophele clutched her skirt in her fingertips, straining on tiptoe as the ring of torchlight widened onto the darkness beyond the gates, the silhouettes of armored men moving rapidly out on either side of their commanders.

Abandoning propriety, she scrambled up onto a nearby hogshead barrel.

When Genon’s hand caught her arm, she thought he was going to make her get down, but he was only bracing her.

“Can you see the caravan, m’lady?”

“Yes.

It’s coming up the hill, that must be Sir Huber with the horses,”

she said.

Her heart went out to the terrified draft animals, helpless in their harnesses as the sounds of the devils rose around them.

That wolf howl sounded so very close.

“Any damage to the caravan?”

The surgeon sounded relieved.

“Not that I can see…oh, but that poor horse!”

she exclaimed.

“One of them has a gash on his back, the poor thing…”

And while she wouldn’t call the caravan damaged, it certainly showed signs of wear.

She had seen the construct before it departed: a long, narrow wagon covered completely in thin sheets of metal, just sufficient to accommodate eight men.

She couldn’t imagine sleeping in such a thing, so hot, airless, with the devils shrieking and savaging the sides all night.

The bare thought made her shiver.

Outside the gate, she could see the soldiers arranging themselves in the same defensive lines they had made inside, and she clapped a hand over her mouth as one man suddenly lifted his spear to jab at something in the dark, followed by his fellows on either side of him.

Three men instantly moved to fill the gap in the line, then moved back again when whatever it was, was dead.

A few spaces down, three more men repeated the maneuver.

It was an impressive sight, and reassuring; they were so brisk and disciplined about it.

“They’re killing devils,”

she reported, her eyes wide as she absorbed every detail for future contemplation.

“I can’t see the devils though… ”

The words had hardly left her mouth when there was a burst of shouting and suddenly a dozen men were down at once.

A huge dark shape exploded into the ring of torchlight, so fast that at first Ophele couldn’t tell what had happened.

“Re-form, re-form!”

Someone was shouting, and the men hustled to fill the gap even as the dark shape charged forward, head thrown back as it howled fit to freeze the blood.

A wolf demon.

That was a wolf demon.

Ophele had seen plenty of sketches by now, that shifting, spikey black shape, its fur bristling and almost smoking.

But those sketches had not conveyed the way that black mane dissolved into the air, nor that glow of poisonous green within the smoke—

Stars, it was huge! Those many layers of defense were collapsing on it, slamming their shields into its sides to slow it down rather than trying to intercept its charge.

“It’s a wolf,”

she said, feeling a hand clutching her wrist, preparatory to hauling her down.

“No, I think they have it, but there are more things beh—oh!”

Her other hand clapped over her mouth as the wolf demon’s head was suddenly separated from its shoulders.

“What, what?”

Genon demanded urgently.

“It’s dead,”

she said, her eyes enormous.

The wave of blood as it was decapitated was black, splashing out thicker than water, something she had never seen, never imagined.

It made her feel a little sick.

But she was not a child to be sheltered from such realities, she told herself sternly.

And in any case, she only had the barest glimpse of that huge, smoky body falling before the soldiers rushed in, hiding it from her sight.

“They’re all right,”

she added belatedly.

She could see more fighting, but it looked organized to her.

It was tempting to think the wolf demon was the initial assault, intended to open gaps in the defense for other devils to exploit, but after many interviews, Ophele thought that was giving the beasts too much credit.

Devils were cunning in the way wolves were cunning, but they were not intelligent.

It was over before the devils had time to test the defenses.

The caravan rolled through the gate in a tremendous clatter and the rows of defenders withdrew in such perfect, organized unison that Ophele boggled, watching the rear lines turn one after another, with Sir Jinmin’s massive shape bringing up the rear.

As the gates creaked closed, she only wished she had gotten a better look at that wolf.

It occurred to her that the Duchess of Andelin should probably not be standing on a hogshead when she greeted the returning heroes.

She lingered just long enough to see Remin, alive and uninjured, and then let Genon help her down, brushing out her skirts anxiously.

“If you like, m’lady,”

he said politely, offering his arm, and Yvain and Dol followed behind as they hurried toward the caravan, which was already disgorging its passengers.

The men were forming up on either side of the road, an honor guard of sorts, and as they cleared a path for her, she wished she were wearing something a little finer than an ink-spattered purple gown.

Remin said that before he spoke, he often set out a few sentences in his mind, and Ophele tried to do the same as she reached the circle around the caravan and then stopped, waiting.

The stink of both the caravan and its occupants was incredible, weeks on the road in that sweaty, airless box and no baths.

They would be filthy, hungry, and tired, and her responsibility to them was both honor and hospitality.

A flick of Remin’s eyes beckoned her forward, and Ophele approached obediently as the travelers assembled.

The last time she had seen Sir Huber was at the feast the night before he left, when he had danced with her and asked her to look after Remin.

At the time, the request had surprised her, but she understood it better now.

Huber and Remin had grown up together.

And Remin had needed looking after, in the end.

“…did right, not to wait,”

Remin was saying as she and Genon approached.

The surgeon went immediately to look everyone over, including a few soldiers who were sitting down, having been mauled a bit by the devils.

“We’ll have to think of a way to let you signal your approach in future, I would have sent men out to meet you.”

“It was hard on the horses,”

Sir Huber agreed.

He looked a good deal leaner than he had been when he had departed, a bronzed whip of a man with his hair gleaming faintly copper in the torchlight.

His eyes went to Ophele, and he offered a brief bow.

“My lady.”

“I’m glad you came back safely,”

she said, looking sympathetically from one exhausted man to the next.

“Thank you for doing something so dangerous.

Your Grace, might we send someone to Wen and Master Balad, to have food and baths prepared for them? ”

Remin blinked.

“Yes,”

he said approvingly, and looked at a nearby soldier.

He didn’t even need to speak the order.

The man was off like a shot.

“Welcome home,”

Ophele concluded, nodding her head as gracefully as she could.

She hoped that was enough.

“Thank you very much, my lady.”

said Sir Huber.

“My lord, I can tell you Ferrede lives, and we helped them bring in the harvest.

Rollon had already built a common hall for sleeping and ordered the defense by the time we arrived.

Elder Brodrim said the town would have been lost, were it not for him.”

Ophele had barely known Rollon before he left; she knew his name and his face, but that was all.

He looked as if he had aged ten years since.

“That’s what I sent you to do,”

Remin said quietly, extending a hand, with a brief but solid squeeze of the squire’s arm.

“I will want your report tomorrow.

Well done.”

“Thank you, Your Grace,”

Rollon replied, standing up straighter.

“All of you have earned your rest.”

Remin stepped back, nodding to Sir Huber.

“Defenders of Ferrede!”

Sir Jinmin led a boisterous round of huzzahs, dissolving into cheers as a group of men led Sir Huber and the rest up the road, battered and weary, but moving under their own steam.

It looked like half the town was about to descend on the unsuspecting Master Balad.

“You did well,”

Remin murmured to Ophele as the stablemaster led the horses away and the rest of the men dispersed, with Sir Jinmin bellowing at the men on the palisade to point their eyeballs north.

Remin didn’t look hurt, but he was disconcertingly blood-spattered.

“It’s not my blood,”

he added when he caught her looking.

“I know. I…saw,”

she said, a little guiltily.

“The wolf demon, I mean.”

“I wondered if you did,”

he said.

Filthy as he was, he didn’t offer his arm as they moved up the street together toward home.

“Did it look like you expected?”

“Bigger,”

she admitted.

“I saw the pictures and everyone said how big they were, but it’s not the same as seeing a real one.

And it was so fast.

I see what you mean now, about not trying to stop them directly.

It would just knock everyone over, wouldn’t it? ”

“Mmm-hmmm.

And you weren’t scared?”

“No…”

She looked up at him in surprise.

“I wasn’t,”

she said, feeling an unaccustomed glow inside, a feeling she had very rarely felt before.

She was timid and cowardly and afraid of so very many things, but she was no longer afraid of this.

“That’s good,”

was all he said, and the torches lining the long road home shone on a small, satisfied smile.

* * *

…blurred by smoke, Ophele wrote the next day, thrilled beyond words to have her very own firsthand account of the devils.

It appears to emanate from around the head and neck and streak backward, with black particles dissolving in the air.

This could be to obscure the movements of the devil, or to aid in concealment, though this purpose would seem to be undermined by the green glow of its eyes.

But perhaps that is a threat display that occurs when it attacks…

By now, Ophele had learned to give herself a few pages to babble before she attempted to incorporate her ideas into her treatise.

It only seemed sensible to her that there would be some logic to the natural world, discoverable reasons why things were the way they were.

Claws for bears, to dig and climb and fight.

Long snouts for hedgehogs, to poke their adorable little noses into narrow places for bugs.

So what purpose did the glowing eyes of a wolf demon serve? Intimidation? And what was that flare of poisonous green she had seen glowing within its smoking mane?

If only she could have gotten a better look.

That thought had jerked her awake before dawn and startled Remin out of a dead sleep: why hadn’t she asked to examine the corpse? She could have learned so much from the wolf demon’s body, and it had been right there.

“You’re not poking at dead devils,”

Remin had said, grumpy at being awakened early, and dragged her back under the covers.

She would ask Sir Justenin next time.

Or maybe Genon.

Had he ever examined one of the devils?

Ophele hummed, scribbling on.

She only had a little time to record her observations and hypotheses; her other project was much more important and time-sensitive, as underscored by the fact that the first thing Remin did every morning was snap open the shutters, looking critically at the progress of the snow on the mountains and the leaves on the trees.

And the stars knew she had enough other demands on her time, not the least of which was—

“Your Grace!”

Elodie’s voice piped from just outside the open door of the cottage, and Ophele turned to find her pagegirl waiting, clutching her sewing sampler and bobbing curtsies like a manikin bird.

“Elodie! Come in, set your things down,”

Ophele said with genuine pleasure, corking her ink bottle and rising to wash her hands.

“We’re going to the market today.

Have you got your shawl tied properly?”

Elodie had a distressing tendency to abandon her shawl in the oddest places, which had required more than one frantic return to the market.

But Ophele did not chasten her for it.

Maybe Sir Leonin looked askance at her, allowing her nine year-old pagegirl to accompany her on these errands, but Elodie was delightful company and made a helpful medium for questions that Ophele could not dare to ask herself.

“Oh, look at that, my lady,”

said Elodie when they arrived in the market square, where stone statues were being removed from large crates.

“Can we go see? What is it?”

“Those are for the fountain,”

Ophele replied, inwardly pleased with the excuse to go watch.

They were a few minutes early for their appointment anyway.

“His Grace said it will be shaped like a sword, and I think those are supposed to be stars.

Master Didion’s sculptor used His Grace’s sword as a model.”

“And water will come out the top?”

Elodie asked, craning her neck.

“No, from the bottom, young lady.

Those pipes there,”

said another voice, and Ophele looked up to find Master Nore Ffloce approaching with the usual fluttering of city plans.

“It will appear the sword is smashing into the earth of the valley and sending out a scattering of stars, a metaphor for our recent history.

How are you, my lady? I hope I have not kept you waiting.”

“Not at all, we only had a moment to admire the fountain,”

Ophele assured him.

“And…are those the lamp-posts you mentioned? Look, Elodie, remember we saw Master Procher and the other blacksmiths making all the metal scrolls for the sides?”

“Yes,”

said Elodie, surveying the lines of lamps.

“They’re all right, I guess. ”

Elodie Conbour was a difficult audience.

“I will hope for greater appreciation when they are strung with banners on a festival day, Miss Conbour,”

Master Ffloce said good-naturedly.

He was an amiable grasshopper of a man, the third of Tresingale’s master architects and the level-headed balance between the surly Master Guisse and the flamboyant Sousten Didion.

“Though it will be some time before that happens.

Can you guess why?”

Elodie despised guessing games.

“No.”

“This,”

he said, and it was surely for the little girl’s benefit that he produced a crystal sphere from his pocket with a flourish.

But when it suddenly glowed in his hand like a lesser sun, Ophele fought the urge to applaud.

“Oh, what makes it do that?”

she asked, and only just remembered to glance at Elodie, implying the question was on behalf of the child.

“It is a Norveni invention, Your Grace,”

the city architect explained.

“Rather too bright for use by day, but by night it will catch the light of moon and stars and reflect it into the many prisms within, magnifying it greatly.

A simple marvel, is it not?”

“I have heard of them, but we never had any in Aldeburke,”

Ophele replied, beaming as he offered it to her.

“How wonderful!”

“Unfortunately, we will still be without this marvel on the Feast of the Departed,”

Master Ffloce said, moving neatly to their other business.

He had managed most of it himself, but he still made a polite fiction of consulting Ophele’s opinion.

Master Wen just shouted at her to get out of his kitchen.

“Torches should do,”

Ophele agreed.

“His Grace said we would only need them for the main roads, and we will have candles at the tables.”

“I will need some help with those,”

Master Ffloce replied, nodding.

“I believe we will have enough places for all the Tresingale residents, but if His Grace could send some fellows to haul the tables from the cookhouse, it would be a great help.

And there is still the matter of laying the fields to rest…”

“Oh, is there?”

Ophele asked, listening with outward politeness and inner consternation.

Her mother had died when she was too young to participate in most religious rites, and thereafter such ceremonies had been solitary affairs: a small offering to her mother, a stolen pinch of incense, a lonely prayer before the fire.

Until she was twelve, Ophele had thought the Feast of the Departed meant everyone left the manor but her.

“Putting the fields to bed?”

Elodie said, when consulted later that afternoon.

“We did that in the garden, for Auntie Jacinthe and Grandma and Grandpa and my cousin Corin.

Mama said they’re all in boats in the sky, so we took the food and buried it in the garden, so they don’t get hungry.”

“Buried it in the garden?”

Ophele repeated, with a flicker of fear.

In all the years since her mother’s death, she had never heard of this.

Had her mother been starving all this time, among the stars?

“From the feast.”

Elodie eyed her curiously.

“Mama said they eat the feast with us.

Don’t they?”

“Oh, yes,”

Ophele said, relieved.

She and Azelma had at least done that much in the kitchen, setting a place for Ophele’s mother at supper.

“What did you do next?”

Grudgingly, Ophele set her own work aside to tackle the problem again the next day, darting back and forth between the office and the square to ferry suggestions between Master Ffloce and Sir Justenin.

It seemed to her that they ought to at least bring the remains of the feast as far as the north gate after supper, so as to save time the next morning, and Sir Justenin said that the dead could only draw sustenance from it before sunrise.

It would give them the largest window of time between the departure of the devils and dawn.

“I’m sorry to run you about,”

she apologized to Sir Leonin and Sir Davi, hurrying her steps toward the stable.

She still tried to make time for Master Eugene at the end of the day, even if she was busy; the donkey would never say that she was a fickle friend.

“It’s not a problem, lady. My lady,”

said Sir Davi, as easygoing as ever.

“At least we’re not fighting off geese today.”

“You don’t need to mind us so much,”

said Sir Leonin, stiff and formal, as if he’d never heard of geese in his life.

He was beginning to remind her of one of Julot’s tin knights.

“We are your guards.

We are meant to be your shadows.”

There was an undercurrent in his words that made Ophele’s smile fall away, and she looked up with sudden anxiety, wondering if she was being rebuked .

“Leonin means you ain’t troubling us, lady,”

Davi said, glancing at the younger man repressively.

“I mean that we are meant to be watching for danger, not socializing,”

Leonin replied, with a flash of cool blue eyes.

“I can work me mouth, me legs, and me eyes all at the same time,”

Davi retorted, his accent thickening with irritation.

They lapsed into prickling silence, and Ophele walked a little faster, wishing she could leave them behind.

Sir Davi was quite nice, but Sir Leonin made her feel like she had some species of raptor trailing her everywhere she went.

A falcon, she thought, recalling the emblem of his House.

A judgmental falcon, peering perpetually over her shoulder.

And she would not think of geese, it was disrespectful.

Fortunately, they were approaching the stables, and the uncomplicated affections of Master Eugene were far preferable to wondering again if she had somehow betrayed her ignorance.

Ophele hurried into the stable yard, pleased to see that the water cart wasn’t even there yet.

They must be working late on the wall.

“M’lady!”

Jacot’s shout came from entirely the wrong direction, the cottages rather than the north gate, and Ophele turned in surprise to see him running toward her, his bright blue eyes wide.

“I’m sorry,”

he panted as he drew up to her.

“M’lady…I’m sorry, been looking everywhere for you.

I swear, Master Eugene was fine this morning…”

Ophele’s stomach dropped.

“He didn’t seem anything but sleepy, I had to keep waking him up every time I stopped to fill the barrels—”

“He always goes to sleep if you let him stand still,”

Ophele managed.

Her eyes were starting to burn.

“He’s old, he just likes to nap.”

“Yes, m’lady,”

Jacot said miserably.

“But…Your Grace, I’m sorry, he died.

I’m sure it didn’t hurt him none, he went quick, he wouldn’t have noticed anything at all—”

She must not cry.

People were streaming up and down the road this time of day, heading to the baths or the cookhouse for supper, and they should not find their duchess sobbing on the side of the road.

Ophele’s throat locked tight as Jacot apologized over and over, the words ringing distantly in her ears.

Eugene had seemed exactly the same as always, right up to the moment he collapsed in his harness next to well seven.

He never got up again.