Page 26

To Mistress Azelma Bessin in the kitchen of Aldeburke, in the duchy of Leinbruke, from Ophele in Tresingale:

Dear Azelma, I hope you are keeping well.

It feels like so long since I saw you, and it’s been so busy here, it hardly seems the same place as when I arrived.

Right outside my window, there’s a new granary and six new cottages, and a new stretch of road that’s almost a mile long.

None of these things were visible, at present.

Ophele was writing by the uncertain light of a candle, and the shutters of the cottage had been reinforced so that not a crack of the torchlight outside showed within.

His Grace’s carpenters had added iron bars to them that morning.

She couldn’t decide whether to be reassured by this or not.

But that is nothing, compared to the bridge.

They started work on that last month, and let me tell you, what a monument is a bridge! Sir Tounot—that is Lord Tounot of Belleme, but he styles himself as Sir—says that when it is done, it will be wide enough for four wagons to go abreast, and will span the whole width of the river.

That is almost a mile long too, but a much grander undertaking, as you might imagine.

At the same time, they are building the footings for the port, and I have gotten to see them at it a little bit.

Sir Edemir says it will be even bigger than the ports on the Emme.

They are always boasting of the Brede here, and how it is so long, so wide, so wild, more dangerous than any other river in the world, so they must build strong to stand up to it.

You will think it is funny, but what I like best is seeing how all the work fits together here, like a puzzle.

I told you about how they are digging those huge trenches for the foundation of the wall, but until yesterday I never wondered, what do they do with all that dirt? Well, it turns out they carted a lot of it away to fill in other places around town, like the pond where the temple will be.

Isn’t that marvelous? To think that building the wall also means building the temple? Sir Miche says they are to begin laying stones for that next year, and when it is done, our temple will have a spire two hundred feet high, the Point of the Valley Star.

The Temple will come and tell us which star looks most kindly upon us, and then the final spire will be aligned to point to it, and catch its light.

Unfortunately, filling in the pond displaced the geese and their babies, but Sir Miche says they are all right; the goslings are old enough to fly, so they have all decamped to the field by the barr—

There was a sudden outburst of howling and Ophele’s quill jerked, spattering the page.

The noises of the devils were familiar now, but no less terrifying for it as they circled around the cottage, sometimes to the north, sometimes to the east.

It made her mouth go dry and her heart thumped painfully in her chest, jerking in spasms of fear.

The nightly chorus had begun.

Sometimes she heard familiar voices outside in the road.

It might be Sir Miche’s voice, drawling and unconcerned, complaining about being bored.

Or Sir Edemir, commanding the nearby defenses with the same calm competence he ordered his secretaries.

Ophele had learned all their rhythms by now, measuring her nights by the comings and goings of the heroes outside her door.

It amazes me that I may write so familiarly of them, the Knights of the Brede.

But they are even better men than we knew, I assure you, always chivalrous and gallant, and very sensitive of propriety, when I am still the only woman in town.

Sir Auber says that his brothers and their wives are meant to come later this year, so perhaps I will have a little society then.

Many people have come already, hoping to settle the valley and take oaths to His Grace.

Most of them must stay on the other side of the Brede for now, because of the devils, but Sir Tounot says there is much provision for them, and they have negotiated with the local lords to be sure they are all safe and have some work.

Sir Tounot is the one that manages them, and I am sure he does it so pleasantly they could hardly mind at all.

He is a handsome man with a cleft chin and curly hair, and so well-spoken that one finds oneself agreeing with him no matter what he says, because he says it so well…

She could have filled pages with stories of the duke’s men.

By day, there would have been a little spiteful pleasure in writing about them, knowing how Lisabe would squirm with jealousy.

But at night, she was reminding herself with every rasping snarl outside the windows who it was that stood between her and the devils in the dark.

I have never seen the devils myself, so I cannot know what they look like.

But I know all their noises.

The ghouls just sound nasty, always growling and snapping, like a rotten dog.

Only, there are so very many of them…

She didn’t know how many.

No one would tell her, not even Sir Miche, which could only mean that there were a great many indeed, so many they thought she would be frightened if she knew.

Hundreds, maybe, to make such a racket.

Thousands? The noises outside were constant now, an escalating cacophony that built and built until she wanted to scream for it to stop.

Rasping, snarling, all of the noises had teeth, tearing at the little town of Tresingale.

I can never decide which is worse, the stranglers or the wolf demons.

Remember that one summer when we heard squealing noises in the wood, and it scared everyone to bits until we found out it was just an elk? The stranglers are a little like that, if the elk was laughing in the dark.

They call most often at sunrise and sunset, when everything else is quiet.

As if they are laughing at their own wickedness.

The wolf demons are more frightening, I think.

I can’t even tell you what it is like to hear one close by, as if their teeth are iron and they are howling through the metal.

I think if I saw one of those, I would just crumple over right there.

But I hate stranglers.

Sometimes I fall asleep and wake up to hear one cackling, and it sounds so close, like it’s right outside the window.

I would rather a wolf demon killed me in one bite than to be waiting for a strangler to creep up upon me. I would never wish you to hear them yourself, but oh, I wish you were here, Azelma. You would laugh at them, I bet, and tell me I am a silly girl. I wish I had thought to ask if you could come with me when we left Aldeburke, for then I would not be so alone. It is hard to be so afraid all by myself.

Sometimes her quill ran away with her.

Ophele scrubbed a hand over her face and hardly noticed when it came away wet.

This was not a letter she could send home.

Rising, she crumpled it up and thrust it into the fire, reaching for a fresh page.

These letters were not only for Azelma.

In the dark of the night, when the fire burned low and it seemed every devil in the world was about to batter down the fragile walls of the cottage, the words poured out of her, the only outlet for her terror.

Who else could she trust? In whom could she confide? Certainly not the Knights of the Brede, who went out into the dark with the creatures every night.

To them she could only be a foolish girl, at best.

They could not know her cowardice.

Her worthlessness. For she was the daughter of their enemy, a backhanded insult to their lord.

She started over.

She tried to sound hopeful.

She tried to sound brave.

In the early hours of the morning, she read her letters anxiously again and again, but it was so hard when she had no gauge for what was normal, or what things she should already know.

If His Grace read her letters, he would only despise her more.

Ophele told herself good stories.

She wrote about the building of the town, and how beautiful the wheat was, growing green on the hills to the north.

She wrote about the wall and how exciting it was to watch it every day, knowing herself a small part of that great enterprise.

She wrote about Eugene and Master Didion and the grand manor to be built on the high hill.

But she did not write that it was to be made in the likeness of Tressin, the ancient house that her divine father had burned to ashes.

Of her husband, the Duke of Andelin, she wrote nothing at all.

* * *

By the time Remin came home, the fire had burned to coals.

It was not the first time he had found the princess asleep at the table, her head pillowed on her arm and her quill still loose in her fingers.

There was a small glass phial at her elbow in a shape he recognized, and he plucked it up, sniffing the dried herbs tied to its neck.

Remin had seen enough such beakers to recognize it at once: one of Gen’s tonics, and this one for sleep, if he recalled his limited herbology correctly.

Gen looked in on the princess regularly, and said she was looking a little worn.

Of all the problems currently before him, the princess’s correspondence ranked very low, but Remin eyed the piles of paper as he went to wash the blood from his hands.

Her handwriting was too messy to read from a distance, but he wouldn’t have done so in any case; it was Juste’s task to read her correspondence, to be sure there was nothing dangerous.

Even if she was the Emperor’s daughter, there were some lines with his wife that Remin would not cross.

That was also why he did her the courtesy of transferring her to the bed, when he would have left anyone else to wake up on their own.

Remin held his breath as he slipped his arms under her, but her lashes didn’t so much as flicker.

She only rolled over and reached for a pillow when he laid her down, curling up small in the center of the bed.

Remin regarded the small bare feet beneath the single ruffle of her chemise, and pulled up a blanket.

Everything about her was a problem.

He just didn’t have time to solve everything, as June passed and the devils came relentlessly on.

In three years, they had never seen so many.

During the war, he had required nightly counts of the carcasses from his men, but even without that comparison, he would have known they were seeing many times that number now.

And summer was just getting started.

It was so hot.

The days were long, but the men had to rest in the shade during the hottest hours, or he would have lost dozens to sun sickness.

Sweating, he and his knights took their own turns moving stones and hauling heavy filler up to the tops of the walls, a mixture of crushed stone, lime, and other materials that bonded into a sort of concrete.

They worked on the palisade, felling a hundred trees a day.

They already knew how inadequate that barrier was.

The guards on the palisade were being dragged off by stranglers every night, and they were burning through torches faster than they could make them.

Devils were slipping through.

A few ghouls got into the cow pen and tore a precious milk cow to pieces.

A wolf demon gave the builders at the barracks a terrifying night; they told Remin the next day about the poison-green eyes they saw glowing in the dark, and the shadow pounding against the walls, howling fit to freeze their blood.

The barracks stood the test, but two builders did not.

They were headed for the Gellege Bridge the next day.

And those were just the attacks Remin knew about.

“No sign of Rollon,”

Jinmin reported, after a week-long attempt to reach Ferrede.

Remin and his men were meeting in his tent once a day now, reporting and coordinating their activities and adjusting as information came in.

“Only made it fifty miles before I had to turn back.

It was bad at night.”

During the war, Jinmin had once referred to an ambush by three Vallethi warbands as a surprise.

“We’ll send men to the other villages,”

Remin began, feeling a sickening roll in his gut.

Isigne.

Meinhem.

Selgin.

Raida.

Nandre. He could picture every one of those villages. He had taken their oaths after the war, promising to reward their loyalty with protection. “We can pull them off the border, full cohorts in marching order.”

“They’ll die if you do,”

said Jinmin in his flat bull’s voice.

“Took a day to build defenses myself, just to see if I could stand them off on the ground.

I’m only here because the stranglers couldn’t get through my armor.

Had wolves trying to bash through my barricades all night.

You empty the border, that might be enough.”

He couldn’t do that.

And Jinmin was right; it was one thing for entire armies on the march to build a fortified encampment every night, with torches and shell barriers on the tents and all the other defenses Remin and his men had devised over the years.

During the war, there had been an entire defensive corps that marched with his army, specifically tasked with keeping the fighters alive at night.

He had disbanded them at the end of the war because he hadn’t thought he would need them anymore.

“If every man had plate armor…”

His brow knotted as he thought aloud.

“And builders for a palisade…”

There had to be a way.

He couldn’t accept this, that he should just give up on his people and let the devils have them.

For hours, they argued about it, and only the fact that it was Jinmin saying this kept him from dismissing it outright.

Jinmin was inclined to understate the problem, if anything.

“Take a company from Tresingale, as an experiment,”

suggested Juste.

“Send them a few days out of town and let them try to assemble defenses on the march.”

“We’ll try it,”

Remin agreed, after a moment’s consideration.

“With all the armor we can spare.

I won’t send anyone to die for no purpose, but we have to try.

I will lea—”

But that set off another uproar.

“You absolutely will not,”

Juste snapped, at the same time that Edemir, Tounot, Jinmin, Huber, and Auber all protested at once.

“Not unless you want to leave Her Grace a widow, m’lord,”

Jinmin said bluntly.

“We’ll draw lots for it,”

said Miche, with none of his usual lazy drawl.

“I didn’t take two arrows and a dagger to the back for you just to let you get eaten by a pack of ghouls.”

There ought to be a statute of limitations on that sort of thing, Remin thought furiously, but did not say.

He was their liege lord, and they would obey his command; they had all sworn sacred oaths to the stars saying so.

But it was also true that almost every one of them could have made a similar claim.

Miche had only been protecting him longest.

Remin was the Duke of Andelin, the last of his blood, and they had fought and won a war at least partially on the premise that his life and his line were more precious than the lives of thousands.

“Jinmin will lead, with one of you to support him,”

he said, clamping down tight on a wave of helpless fury.

He could not go.

It was his lot to send others to die instead.

“Draw lots for the second position.

The question is how many we can send without weakening Tresingale’s defenses…”

They labored hours more, answering that question, and in the end, it was Jinmin and Huber that marched out of Tresingale one morning, with fifty men and a dozen horses that Remin really couldn’t spare.

Huber had gone as if he were daring Remin to protest the decision, the only one of Remin’s men who was capable of silencing him with a look.

“We need to manage the town’s defenses better in the meantime,”

noted Tounot.

“Localize the alerts when a devil gets through the lines.

If we don’t let people get some sleep, Rem, they’re going to start having accidents.”

Everything was like that, a constant balance between too much and not enough.

Remin had a depressing number of similarly impossible quandaries that he could trot out for a little perspective, but he was extremely bitter about the whole thing.

And even as he wrestled with these familiar problems of manpower and supply, he was discovering whole new categories of worry.

During the endless week that Jinmin and Huber were outside the walls, Remin was wondering whether it was normal for a lady to keep falling asleep in her bath.

More than once, he had returned to the cottage to find the princess asleep in the water with her head lolling against the rim of the cauldron.

He could understand someone falling asleep in a normal bath; those were quite nice.

But she was curled up in a little knot of skinny limbs and long wet hair, and he had to shake her to wake her up.

“Oh—what? Did I fall asleep?”

She managed to get it together enough to cover her breasts with her hands, blinking owlishly.

“I’m sorry, you don’t have to—”

It was the third time he had found her like this.

Remin fished her out of the water and felt her forehead, his face grim.

He kept meaning to look in on her.

It felt like he barely saw her these days, and he had a nagging feeling that something was wrong, but no idea what it was.

“Are you sick? I won’t be angry if you are.”

He set her in the chair by the fire and reached for a towel, trying not to embarrass her by looking at her.

“I will be angry if you don’t tell me.”

She shook her head.

“Are you having trouble sleeping?”

he asked, in sudden inspiration.

Her eyes did look shadowed, and he knelt down before her, draping a towel over her shoulders.

“I saw Gen’s tonic, and I know it’s loud at night—”

“I’m all right.”

She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“That’s not what I asked.

If something’s wrong—”

“Rem!”

Auber shouted from outside.

“They’re back!”

Remin had to bite his tongue to keep from cursing.

“Get dressed,”

he said.

“I’ll be back to take you to supper, but I’m on watch tonight.

Don’t be scared, Princess.

Nothing will hurt you.”

He could at least keep that promise, Remin thought savagely, hurrying with Auber to the north gate, where Jinmin and Huber were returning with nineteen men, of whom six had lost limbs.

There were no horses.

There was nothing to say.

There was nothing the Duke of Andelin could do but get out of the way as Genon hurried to do his work among the wounded.

The wide, heavy gates swung shut.

Thirty-one men were dead.

Thirty-one.

It was nothing compared to the blood Remin had spilled over the previous seven years, but he still had to back off and breathe, containing it behind the hard mask of his face.

Should he have anticipated this? Should he have moved men to the villages sooner? He had planned to set up local militias this year, but there hadn’t seemed any urgency; the folk of the Andelin knew how to cope with the devils as well as anyone did.

“We can’t go,”

said Huber, coming to stand beside him.

His bronzed face was bloody and his eyes socketed with weariness.

“We only made it twenty miles before we had to turn back.

The stranglers kept going for our torches.

Anyone you send is going to die.”

“I gave them my word,”

Remin replied, low and anguished.

He couldn’t stop picturing a silent Ferrede, with all the shutters and doors torn open, and the acres of wheat blowing in the wind, untended.

Elder Brodrim.

All those frightened people who had renewed their oath to him.

“I know.”

Huber glanced at him, an ocean of understanding passing between them.

Since they were boys, Huber had been the one to watch the most and say the least.

After Victorin’s death, he had had little to say at all.

But in this case, his silence was simply because there was nothing that could be said.

There were no words of comfort he could offer in the face of abandoning hundreds of innocent people to the devils.

There should not be any words that would justify such a thing.

“Are you all right?”

The princess asked when he returned to take her to supper, looking up at him with solemn eyes.

“Fine.”

He was still trying to think of a way to save them later that night, as he stood guard in the lines before the masons’ camp.

It boasted the same defenses as the lines on the west side of town, with break walls and torch towers and archers.

All the defenses the rest of his villages lacked.

Maybe he should try to lead a group of men himself.

Didn’t he owe it to them to try? To risk his own safety, when his common folk had no one to protect them? Perhaps if he took only knights in armor, and they built shelters for the horses…

But what if something happened to Tresingale? What if the town’s defenses fell? He had already weakened them with this first experiment.

He could not spare the men to guard when he also needed them to build, and it would be a bitter irony if he went out to save his stricken villages, only to find that Tresingale had been devoured behind him.

No one could make this decision for him.

And it wasn’t the first time he had faced such a terrible choice, but every time was as bad as the first.

Where was his duty? Whose lives should he sacrifice? He could not save everyone.

He was too far away to see it when a wolf got through the gap in the north wall.

He heard it, though.

Alarms rolled backward in quick succession, and in the quiet air of the summer night he could hear distant shouts.

Torches lit in a line, following the trail of the creature.

The instructions for defenders were to hold their ground, sound the alarm, but do not pursue.

That would only open a gap in the defenses that other devils would slip through.

The alarms and cries rampaged southward, down the cobblestones of the only road in Tresingale.

Toward the cottages.

He had taken three steps forward before he even realized it.

The wolf demon wouldn’t reach them.

He knew it wouldn’t.

And he knew there had been excellent reasons why he was here rather than guarding the cottages by the cookhouse, but at that moment, he couldn’t remember what they were.

Who was in charge of the defenses over there? Darri.

Cat-eyed Darri, the subtle blade, who had carried out any number of complicated and dangerous assignments.

He could trust Darri.

He knew that.

But the princess was there, with no better defense than mud and sticks, and the sound of a wolf demon howling at close quarters was like standing inside a war horn.

Soft fingers wrapped around his throat, and Remin whipped his head around and slammed it into the grinning face of the strangler.

It was already too late to yell.

He had been stupid, walking out of the circle of torchlight.

He smacked his sword and shield together as a warning signal and then threw both on the ground; there was no room to swing his sword, the strangler was already wrapping its skinny, squishy limbs around him like the coils of a snake.

Yanking his knife out of its sheath, he slammed it into the devil’s attenuated body and jerked it upward, snarling into its huge pale eyes.

It gave a rasping scream and Remin grabbed its hands and tore.

Muscles popped in his wrists and forearms as he ripped that strangling grip loose and smashed the creature onto the ground, crushing its skull under his heavy boot.

He was furious with himself.

He could hear the other guards behind him signaling warnings to each other, adjusting their positions while he dealt with the creature, and only when he smashed his boot down a second time did it finally die, twitching.

Remin sucked in a huge breath, kicking the body aside.

He wanted to cough.

His sides were jerking with the need to cough, but it was a matter of pride that he clenched his jaw, buttoned it in, and straightened, picking up his sword and shield.

Even then he couldn’t help turning to look as the extra torches by the stables winked out, signaling that the wolf demon was dead.

The princess was safe.

He had known she would be.

He had never in his life felt so clearly that he was not where he should be.

But it could not be helped tonight.

He was on guard here.

He was responsible for the lives of these men.

Tomorrow night it would be different, but right now his duty was to the men sleeping behind him.

And just like that, the decision was made.

He could not save his villages.

All he could do was abandon and endanger the people at his back.

There was nothing to be done but endure together.

Endure the heat, endure the work, endure the devils and the endless nights.

The walls would be built, if he had to lay every stone himself. There would be a city, and they would find a way to deal with the devils once and for all.

If anyone survived in his villages, he would see that they never wanted for anything as long as they lived.

But he could not save everyone.

If he had learned nothing else in all the harsh years of his life, it was that people died, and he could not stop it.

But his gaze lingered on a distant cottage, and in his mind’s eye he saw a small woman with a solemn face, who made him feel more uncertain than ever.