Black water swallowed the first outrider before his scream could finish. Maren Voss counted his horse going under, one hand pressing her shoulder against the sucking mud, and then the second rider came past her position, close enough for the bog-stink of his cloak to fill her nostrils. She did not waste a throwing knife on a rider already committed to the deeper channel. She waited, eyes on the pale line of his jaw.
His horse lunged. The marsh opened its mouth.
Maren rose from the reeds in one practiced motion, mud sucking at her boots, and drove her short sword up through the gap in his hauberk where the leather strap had rotted. The man jerked once, gargled, and the weight of him pulled the horse sideways into the black water. She held the grip until the blade came free with a wet, sucking sound, then wiped it on the dead man's cloak as his body slid under.
"Clear left," she called, barely above a whisper.
Sergeant Poul's answering whistle came sharp and low from the deeper sedge. Twenty of her fighters lay belly-down along the embankment, breath held, watching the rest of the enemy patrol flounder in the channel Rendyll's own scouts had sworn was passable after the last rain. The scouts had been wrong. The marsh was older than their maps and far less forgiving.
Six riders remained of the twelve who had entered the kill zone. Their captain, a thick-necked man with a soaked crimson plume on his helm, was shouting something she could not hear over the glug and scream of horses drowning in three feet of water that pretended to be a road. His standard bearer had lost the standard. The banner lay somewhere in the silt, a smear of color in the black water.
Maren waved the signal. Arrows whispered out of the reeds. Two riders fell. A third threw himself from his horse and tried to wade back toward solid ground, but the bottom dropped away and the black water took him at the waist, then the chest, then the chin. He did not scream. He simply went quiet.
The remaining three broke. One spurred toward the eastern bank where Sergeant Vell awaited with polearms. The second turned his mount, a grey, and tried to leap the channel entirely. The horse made the bank by a hand's width, stumbled, and the rider cracked his skull on a half-sunken stump. He did not rise. The third, the captain with the crimson plume, managed to reach firmer ground on the western edge and sat his horse there, sides heaving, sword out, eyes wild.
Maren walked out of the marsh onto the bank, her boots squelching with each step, and stopped twelve paces from him. She did not raise her blade. The water draining from her armor made a small, private music in the sudden quiet.
"Ride back to your warlord," she said. Her voice was level, a little hoarse from breathing through her nose for the last hour. "Tell him Greenmoor's flank is no longer a road. Tell him Maren Voss sends her regards."
The captain stared at her. Foam flecked his horse's lips. His own lips worked around a curse that never quite found its shape.
"Tell him," she added, "that if he wants the marsh opened again, he can send his own engineers. I hear they drown just as easily as his scouts."
He turned the horse and kicked it into a lurching canter. She watched him go until the trees swallowed him. Then she let out the breath she had been holding since the first rider entered the water, and only then did her hands begin to shake.
Poul emerged from the sedge at her shoulder, his face a mask of green and brown muck. He had a fresh cut across his cheekbone that wept a thin line of blood. He did not seem to notice it.
"Clean sweep," he said. "Twelve down, one ridden off to tell the tale."
"Three got out, technically."
"One got out with a story worth hearing. The other two are feeding the eels." He paused. "You let the captain live on purpose."
Maren looked down at the black water still settling itself where the horses had gone under. A bubble rose and burst. The smell of it reached her, sweet and foul together.
"Warlord Rendyll does not tolerate reports of failure," she said. "That man will spend the next three days wondering if I will come for him in his sleep. Rendyll will spend the next three days wondering if I have deeper water behind me. Uncertainty is a kind of sword, Poul. It cuts both ways."
Poul made a small sound in his throat that might have been approval. "Pretty words for a woman ankle-deep in horseshit."
"Always have been." She finally cleaned her blade properly, sliding it along a strip of reed until the steel sang faintly. "Get the dead stripped. We need the horse tack for the next patrol, and the coin's no use to them. Move the bodies into the deeper channel. The current will take them by dawn."
"And the horse meat?"
"Smoke it if you can. Eat it raw if you cannot. Rendyll will not send another patrol through this stretch until he has remapped it, and by then we need to be two days' march north."
Poul nodded and went. Maren remained where she stood, watching the last ripples smooth themselves into a sheet of black glass. Somewhere beyond the tree line, a crow called, and another answered. The marsh settled into its ancient patience, as if it had never been disturbed at all.
She did not let herself think about the man whose jaw she had read. She could not afford it. She thought instead about the way the water had taken his horse, the exact angle of the lunge, how the mud had held her boots and the mud had not held his. Tactics. Logistics. The clean arithmetic of ambush.
That arithmetic had a smell, though. She breathed through her mouth for the rest of the night.
The camp on the high ground was a sparse thing. A ring of low fires, a string of tethered ponies, and thirty-three souls who had learned to sleep in armor. The wounded lay closest to the central fire, where the heat reached them. The dead, such as there were, had been wrapped in their own cloaks and laid in a row beneath a stand of birch. Maren would not look at that row yet. There would be time for names later. There was always time for names later, and never enough time now.
She found a stump at the edge of the firelight and sat, unlacing her mud-caked boots with fingers that had finally stopped trembling. The cold crept in through the holes in her stockings. She let it.
Vell came and set a wooden bowl at her feet without a word. Salt pork and some sort of root mash, gray with smoke. She ate without tasting, the way she had learned to eat when she was a conscript in Rendyll's own supply lines, back when she was still a girl with a village to her name and a mother who sang while she worked the loom.
That village was ash now. Four winters past, give or take. She had stopped counting the seasons by their names and started counting them by the scars on her hands.
A boy, no more than fifteen, crouched across the fire from her and stared. She recognized the look. The hungry, half-terrified curiosity of a recruit who had just watched his commander walk out of a marsh with blood on her blade and orders on her tongue, and who was trying to decide whether to worship her or fear her more.
"Go to sleep, Tam," she said, without looking up. "The eastern watch needs eyes at first light."
The boy flinched, scrambled to his feet, and vanished into the dark. She felt a small twist of something under her ribs, not quite guilt, not quite tenderness. She had been that boy once, before Rendyll's men had come to Greenmoor's outer farms and taught her what the word "conscript" really meant. Before she had learned that the safest place to be in a war was the one no one else wanted.
Poul returned, moving with the careful quiet of a man who knew which branches cracked. He had cleaned his face but the cut on his cheek had reopened and was bleeding into his collar. He sat beside her, and for a while neither of them spoke.
"The eastern scouts are back," he said at last. "Rendyll's main force has crossed the Greymere. They're making camp on the south road, two days' march from the moor."
"Two days." She rolled the number around in her mouth like a stone. "He's not rushing."
"No. He's sending engineers ahead. Surveyors. Wagons of brush and stone. He's going to build a proper causeway through the marsh and come at us from the flank he was supposed to take from his scouts."
"Or he wants us to think he is. So we shift our line to meet him there and leave the north road open for a second column."
Poul looked at her. "You think there is a second column?"
"I think Rendyll has never in his life done the obvious thing when the devious one was open to him." She set the empty bowl down. "He is a patient man, and patient men do not waste patience on a single road when there are two."
"Gods above." Poul rubbed a hand over his face, smearing the blood from his cut. "We are thirty-three, Maren. If he comes at us with two columns and engineers besides, we do not hold Greenmoor. We become a story the bards tell to frighten children."
"Children are frightened by everything, Poul. That is their purpose." She pulled her boots back on, lacing them tight against the cold. "We are not going to hold Greenmoor. We are going to make Greenmoor cost him so much that when he takes it, he has nothing left to take with it. That is the only kind of victory people like us ever get."
Poul was quiet for a long moment. The fire cracked and spat. Somewhere in the dark, a pony stamped and blew.
"You sound like him," he said, finally. "When he was still just a captain. Before the queen's war made him a warlord."
Maren did not answer that. She picked up a stick and prodded the coals, sending a brief constellation of sparks up into the black air. She thought of a road she had walked four winters ago, a road that had led her to a man with a rough voice and a Lowland accent and eyes that never quite looked at her when he spoke. She had been a prisoner then, a conscript with blood on her hands she had not chosen to spill. He had looked through her, around her, as if she were a piece of furniture he was deciding whether to keep.
She had decided for him. She had walked out of his camp one night with a stolen horse and a stolen map and a new name for the boy she had been, and she had not stopped walking since.
"Get some sleep," she told Poul. "I want a full report on the Greymere crossing by dawn. Every wagon, every banner, every man you can count without being seen. If his engineers are what he says they are, they will be the slowest part of his army. We will know exactly where he is by the dust they raise."
Poul nodded and rose, wincing as his knee complained. He paused.
"You really think he remembers you? After all this time? You were a face in a column."
"He remembers everything, Poul. That is what makes him dangerous, and that is what makes him useful to fear." She met his eyes across the fire. "Go."
He went. Maren stayed where she was, listening to the camp settle into the small sounds of exhaustion: the clink of a buckle, the murmur of a prayer, the soft, resigned weeping of a man who thought no one could hear him. She knew that weeping. She had done it herself, once, in a ditch not three miles from where her village had stood.
She did not weep now. She sat until the fire burned down to a low orange line, and then she rose, and walked the perimeter of the camp alone, checking the sentries, checking the picket lines, checking the positions she had chosen for the morning retreat. Every step was a small act of faith. Every step said: there will be a morning. There will be a retreat. There will be a next fight.
Somewhere to the south, Rendyll was sleeping in a tent warmed by braziers, attended by men who would die for the sound of his voice. He was, she suspected, looking at a map of the same marsh and seeing in it the shape of his own legend. She had read that look on his face once, the night she had been brought before him as a captive scout, the night he had decided she was too young to hang and too stubborn to release.
He had been right about the stubbornness, at least.
The eastern sky began to pale. Maren turned her face toward it, tasting the cold, and waited for the first bird to call the hour. When it did, she would give the order to break camp, and the long, patient work of making a warlord bleed for every mile would begin again.
The eastern sky was the color of a bruise when the first bird called, a single thrush with a voice like a struck bell. Maren rose from her crouch at the edge of the camp and let the signal carry. All around her, the resistance stirred. Not with the sharp discipline of Rendyll's professional companies, but with the slower, rougher rhythm of people who had learned to fight in ditches and woods, in barns and cellars, in the ruins of places they had once called home.
She walked among them, and they parted for her, and not one of them smiled.
There was nothing to smile about. They were three hundred and twelve souls against a force forty times their number, and they were running out of places to run. Behind them, Greenmoor held, battered but unbowed, its walls blackened with fire, its gates chained, its defenders sleeping in shifts with their boots on. Ahead of them, Rendyll's columns fanned out across the marsh like the fingers of a great hand closing into a fist. To the east lay the Greymarch, a wasteland of salt flats and drowned roads where no army could forage. To the west lay the Iron Queen's domain, and the only pass that led into it was held by a garrison of her Wraith cavalry under a commander whose loyalty was, at best, conditional.
The order to break camp went down the line in whispers. Maren had forbidden open speech after the first night, when a sentry had coughed at the wrong moment and three of their best scouts had been cut off and killed before the camp had even finished stirring. Now the word passed hand to hand, palm to shoulder, a quiet chain of pressure and release. By the time the sun crested the treeline, the camp was gone, and three hundred and twelve people were moving north through the reeds in a column four abreast, their feet leaving no print on the spongy ground.
Maren walked at the head of the column. She did not look back. Looking back was a luxury reserved for those who believed they would return.
Three hours later, a runner caught up with her from the south. He was a boy of perhaps fifteen, one of the village orphans who had attached himself to her band after the burning of Ashwick, and he ran with the desperate, loose-limbed grace of a fox. His name was Pip, though Maren had not given him the name and would not have thought to ask its origin. He had thin wrists and eyes too old for his face, and he had not yet learned to hide what he saw.
He skidded to a halt in front of her, breathing hard, his chest heaving.
"Ash-Walker." He used the name the resistance had given her, the name that had followed her since the night of the caravan, the name she still could not bear to hear spoken aloud. "There is a column on the south road. Refugees. Out of Dunhallow."
Maren stopped walking. The column behind her began to slow, then stop, the word passing back in the same hand-to-shoulder ripple.
"How many?"
"Six hundred, maybe more. Women, children, old men. Wagons. Livestock."
"And Rendyll?"
"Two leagues behind them. Maybe less. He is not hurrying."
Maren closed her eyes for a moment. She could see the shape of it in her mind, as clearly as if she had drawn it on a map. Rendyll did not need to hurry. The refugees were moving slower than any army, and they were moving toward his columns, not away from them. They were moving toward him because they had been told, by some king's messenger or some local lordling who still believed in the old order, that Greenmoor would receive them. That Greenmoor would open its gates.
Greenmoor could not open its gates. Greenmoor was already feeding fourteen thousand mouths within walls that had been built to hold four. Every granary in the city had been emptied into the common stores a fortnight ago. Every root cellar had been stripped. The rats in the lower bailey had been hunted to extinction by children with clubs, and even the dogs had been eaten, though no one spoke of that openly.
If those six hundred refugees reached Greenmoor, the city would fall inside a week. Not to Rendyll's siege engines, not to his sappers, not to his Wraith cavalry. To hunger.
And Rendyll knew it.
She opened her eyes. Pip was watching her face with the terrible patience of a boy who had already guessed what she was going to say and was waiting for her to say it anyway.
"The road they are on," she said. "Where does it pass through the woods?"
Pip swallowed. "Through the Greenvale. The old logging road, past the charcoal pits."
"Is there a stretch where the trees close in? Where the road narrows?"
"The narrows. Yes. By the old mill."
Maren nodded. She had walked that road herself, once, on a winter's night when she had been running from something she did not want to name. She remembered the way the trees leaned in over the road, the way the wind moved through them and made a sound like weeping, the way the mill wheel had been frozen in place for as long as anyone could remember, its timbers silver with old rot.
She remembered, too, that the road was bordered on both sides by dry underbrush, and that the underbrush had not seen rain in the better part of a month.
She turned to the man at her shoulder, a one-eyed veteran of the Thornfield skirmish whose name she did not know and had never asked, because names were a kind of intimacy she could not afford.
"Take forty men. Circle south, through the marsh. Do not let them see you. When you reach the narrows, do not let anyone through."
The man's single eye regarded her without expression. He had heard her, and he had understood, and he would do what she asked, and neither of them would ever speak of it again.
"And if they try to turn back?"
"Then they try to turn back."
He nodded once, a small, precise motion of the head, and turned away. Maren watched him go, and felt something inside her go cold, the way a blade goes cold when it has been drawn from a body and is waiting to be cleaned.
She did not give the order for the column to resume its march. She stood where she was, in the middle of the road, and she waited, and she listened to the wind in the reeds, and she tried very hard not to think about anything at all.
The wind smelled of smoke.
It was not until midafternoon that she heard what had happened. By then, she had marched the column another four miles north, past the old Roman causeway, past the standing stone that the locals called the King's Finger, past the place where a shepherd had once found a hoard of silver coins and had been murdered for them by his own brother. She had stopped at a shallow ford to water the horses and let the children rest, and she was standing in the cold water, her boots off, her feet numb, when she heard the sound.
It was not a sound, exactly. It was the absence of a sound, a stillness that moved through the column like a wave, a sudden cessation of coughing and murmuring and the small, unconscious noises that a body of three hundred makes simply by being alive. Maren pulled her feet from the water and stood, and she saw Pip standing on the bank above her with his arms wrapped around himself, and she knew.
"How bad?" she said.
Pip's mouth worked. "The wind was wrong. It carried east, into the trees. Some of them ran. The ones who ran got out. Maybe a hundred. The rest..."
He could not finish. Maren did not need him to.
She waded to the bank and pulled on her boots without drying her feet, and she stood there for a long moment, looking south, toward the column of smoke that was now visible above the treeline, a pale grey smear against the afternoon sky. Somewhere in that column of smoke were the remains of six hundred people who had trusted a messenger who had promised them safety. Somewhere in that smoke were children who had been carrying toys. Somewhere in that smoke were old women who had been carrying the last letters of their dead husbands.
Somewhere in that smoke was the future of Greenmoor.
Maren turned her back on it and gave the order to resume the march.
That evening, they made camp in a hollow between two hills, a place that could be defended from above if they had time to dig in, which they did not. Maren did not eat. She sat at the edge of the fire and watched the flames, and the flames watched her back with a hundred small, indifferent eyes.
A man came to her, near midnight. He was older than most of them, white-bearded, missing three fingers on his left hand. He had been a blacksmith in Dunhallow before the war, and he had joined her band because his wife had been killed in the first sacking and his daughters had been taken by Rendyll's provosts and never seen again. His name was Edric. Maren had never asked his name. He had never offered it.
"They are saying things," Edric said. He did not sit. He stood before her, arms at his sides, his voice low and careful. "The new ones. The ones who came up from the narrows. They are saying things about what happened."
"Let them say them."
"They are saying it was not an accident. They are saying the wind was wrong. They are saying someone lit the brush on purpose."
Maren looked up at him. The firelight made her face look older than it was, and older still than she felt, which was not at all. She felt, in that moment, as young as she had ever been, as young as the girl who had hidden in a ditch while her village burned, as young as the conscript who had been marched north in chains to serve a queen she had never seen.
"Who lit the brush, Edric?"
He held her gaze. "You know who lit the brush."
"I asked you a question."
"You know who lit the brush," he said again, and this time his voice cracked, and she heard in it the sound of a man who was not accusing her but who could not, in good conscience, defend her. "The wind was wrong. The brush was dry. The refugees were slow. And yet they burned."
"Would you rather Greenmoor had fallen?"
He flinched. It was a small flinch, barely visible, but Maren saw it, and she filed it away in the part of her mind where she kept the things she could not afford to feel.
"Greenmoor has not fallen," he said. "Greenmoor is holding. Greenmoor will hold, perhaps, for another month. And in that month, Rendyll will grow stronger, not weaker. His Wraith cavalry will ride down every village in the Greymarch. His provosts will hang every man who can hold a scythe. And when Greenmoor finally opens its gates, it will be to a countryside that is empty of everything but crows."
"That is not my doing."
"It is your doing," he said, and his voice had gone quiet now, quiet and precise, the voice of a man who has thought about this for a long time and has arrived at a conclusion he wishes he could unmake. "It is your doing because you are the one who gives the orders. It is your doing because no one else in this column has the courage to give them. And it is your doing because, when the wind was wrong, you did not stop it."
Maren stood. The motion was slow, deliberate, the motion of a woman who has been sitting for a long time and whose joints have stiffened. She stood, and she looked down at Edric, and she did not raise her voice.
"I did not stop it," she said, "because I could not stop it. Because the wind was already blowing, and the brush was already burning, and the refugees were already running. And because, if I had stopped it, Greenmoor would have fallen by the new moon, and every man, woman, and child inside those walls would have been put to the sword, and the Iron Queen would have lost her last foothold in the south."
Edric said nothing.
"You may say what you like about me," Maren said. "You may call me what you like. You may take your sword and walk into the dark and never come back. But do not stand here, in my camp, and tell me that I did not save what I was trying to save."
Edric looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked away, and the motion of his head was the motion of a man who has been beaten in an argument he did not want to win.
"I am not leaving," he said. "I never said I was leaving."
"Then what are you saying?"
"I am saying," he said, and his voice had gone thick now, and she heard in it the sound of a man who had not wept in many years and was not going to weep now, "that the name they have given you is the right one. Ash-Walker. That is what you are. That is what you do. You walk through the ash, and you do not look back, and the people who follow you are the people who have decided that the ash is preferable to the fire."
He turned and walked away before she could answer, and she did not try to stop him, because there was nothing she could say that would not sound like a justification, and because she had decided, long ago, that justifications were a kind of lie she could not afford to tell.
She sat back down by the fire, and she watched the flames, and she tried not to think about the sound a child makes when it realizes that the fire is not a game.
The night deepened. The column slept, or tried to sleep. Maren did not sleep. She sat by the dying fire and listened to the wind move through the hollow, and she thought about the woman she had been before the war, the girl who had wanted nothing more than to tend her father's sheep and marry the miller's son and grow old in the same house where she had been born. That girl was dead. She had been dead for a long time, perhaps since the night of the ditch, perhaps since earlier, perhaps since the day she had first understood that the world was not a place where good things happened to good people.
She thought about the woman she was now, the woman who gave orders that sent men into the brush with torches, the woman whose name was spoken in campfires with a mixture of awe and horror, the woman who had saved Greenmoor and damned herself in the same breath.
She thought about the woman she would have to become, if the war went on, if the column survived, if Rendyll did not catch them before they reached the pass. That woman did not yet have a name. That woman was waiting, somewhere in the ash, for Maren to walk far enough to find her.
The eastern sky began to pale. The same thrush, or its cousin, called the hour from the ridge above the camp. Maren rose, and gave the order to break camp, and led the column north, into the marsh, into the smoke, into the long, patient work of making a warlord bleed for every mile.
Behind her, the fire went out.
The Warlord Rendyll did not sleep either. He sat in the command tent at the edge of the forward camp, with a map of Greenmoor spread across the table before him, and he studied the lines of approach with the patience of a man who had learned, long ago, that patience was the only virtue that paid.
The tent smelled of lamp oil and leather and the faint, sweet undertone of the blackleaf paste he kept in a horn box at his belt. He did not use the paste often. He preferred his mind unclouded. But the night had been long, and the news from the forward scouts had been worse than long, and there were hours yet before dawn, and the work required a certain clarity that the paste, in small doses, provided.
A scout entered. The man's boots were dark with marsh mud. He saluted, fist to chest.
"Report," Rendyll said.
"Lord. The column has turned north. Into the marsh. The forward vedettes have lost contact. The ground is too broken, too wet. The horses cannot follow."
Rendyll did not look up from the map. "How many vedettes?"
"Twelve, lord. In three parties."
"Pull them back. Establish a cordon at the marsh's edge. I want fires lit every hundred yards. I want the column to know it is being watched. I do not want it to feel safe."
The scout saluted again and withdrew.
Rendyll studied the map. His finger traced the line of the southern aqueduct, the thick black stroke that marked the watercourse from the mountains to the city. The aqueduct entered Greenmoor through the southern quarter, passed beneath the old tannery, emerged in the market square, and from there branched to the cisterns that fed the lower city.
"The southern quarter," Rendyll murmured to himself. "The old tannery."
He had studied the aqueduct before. He had studied every approach to Greenmoor before. The southern quarter was the weakest point. The walls there were older, lower, built on the fill of a long-ago landfill. The aqueduct ran beneath them in a tunnel wide enough for four abreast. A determined force, moving fast, could be through the tunnel and into the market square before the garrison knew they had come.
But the tunnel would be guarded. And the garrison commander would have posted his best men at the aqueduct's mouth. And any force sent into that tunnel would be cut off from retreat, caught in the narrow stone throat, destroyed.
Unless.
Rendyll's finger stopped on a notation at the map's edge. A small, neat script in the cartographer's hand: Sluice gate, southern overflow, 2 leagues W.
He looked up. He called for his aide.
"Send for Captain Drego," he said.
Drego came. The mercenary's face was still, his eyes still watchful. He had not slept either. He had been studying the dispositions of his own company, calculating the odds of the coming assault, and finding them, as he always did, just on the wrong side of acceptable.
"Captain," Rendyll said. "Sit."
Drego sat. Rendyll pushed the map across the table until it lay between them.
"You see the southern aqueduct."
"I see it, lord."
"You see the overflow sluice, two leagues west."
"I see it."
"Tell me what you see."
Drego studied the map. His finger traced the line of the aqueduct, the branching of the southern overflow, the gate. "The sluice gate," he said. "It controls the overflow. When the spring melt is heavy, the aqueduct is relieved through the southern channel. The gate is there to keep the channel dry in summer."
"And in winter?"
"In winter, the gate is closed. The overflow runs through the main channel. The southern branch is dry."
"For how long?"
"For as long as the gate is closed."
"And if the gate were opened."
Drego was silent for a moment. Then he said, "The southern branch would fill. The water would run down into the lower quarter. Into the market square."
"Yes."
"It would flood the market square."
"It would."
"And if a force were waiting in the southern branch, with the gate open, they would have water to cover their approach. They would have the sound of the water to cover their movement. They would have the wet to choke the fires in the tunnel mouth."
Rendyll smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. "Yes."
"You want me to take a force through the southern branch."
"I want you to take a force through the southern branch, into the tunnel mouth, and into the market square. I want you to take the southern quarter before dawn. I want you to hold the gate open until my main assault is through the breach at the river. I want Greenmoor to wake in the morning and find that the war is over."
"The branch is two leagues long. The tunnel beyond it is another half league. The total distance from the sluice gate to the market square is two and a half leagues, in the dark, through water that will be chest-deep at the far end."
"I am aware of the distance."
"The men will have to swim in places. They will have to carry their weapons above the water. They will be cold. They will be slow. They will be exposed."
"Yes."
"It is a suicide run, lord."
"Yes."
Drego looked at the map for a long time. Then he looked at Rendyll.
"Why me?"
"Because you are the best captain I have. Because the men will follow you into the water if anyone can make them. Because the alternative is to sit outside these walls and starve until the Iron Queen's patience runs out, and I do not intend to starve."
Drego nodded slowly. "How many men?"
"Two hundred. Hand-picked. The strongest swimmers. Men who do not mind the cold."
"Two hundred, through two and a half leagues of water, in the dark, into a fortified city."
"Yes."
"And if I refuse?"
Rendyll's smile did not change. "Then I will find another captain. And that captain will take your company with him. And I will have you executed at dawn for cowardice in the face of the enemy, as an example to the rest."
"I see."
"Do you refuse?"
Drego was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "No, lord. I do not refuse."
"Good. Pick your men. Be at the sluice gate by midnight. I will have the gate opened at the third hour after midnight. You will have until dawn."
"Yes, lord."
"Drego."
The captain paused at the tent's edge.
"When this is over, if you survive, there will be a lordship in it for you. A seat in the new kingdom. A place at the table when the Black Throne is taken."
"I am not interested in a lordship, lord."
"What are you interested in?"
Drego did not answer. He saluted, fist to chest, and went out into the night.
Rendyll watched him go. He took a small pinch of the blackleaf paste from the horn box at his belt and set it on his tongue. He let it dissolve slowly, and the clarity came, sharp and clean, and he returned to the map, and he began to plan the rest of the assault.
By midnight, Captain Drego had his two hundred men at the sluice gate. They were stripped to shirts and breeches. Their weapons were wrapped in oilcloth and slung on their backs. Their faces were blacked with soot. They stood in the dark, breathing steam, waiting.
Drego stood before them. He did not give a speech. He had never been a man for speeches. He said only, "Stay close. Move quiet. When we get to the far end, stay behind me until I tell you to go."
The gate opened. The water came. It was black and cold and it smelled of moss and old stone, and it rose quickly, ankle to knee to thigh, and the men waded in, and the current took them, and they moved into the dark, into the southern branch, into the long slow pull toward Greenmoor.
Drego went first. He had always gone first. It was a habit he had picked up in a previous life, in a previous war, in a country that no longer existed except in the dreams of men who had been young in it. He did not think about that life. He thought about the water. He thought about the cold. He thought about the woman at the inn, and the letter she had carried, and the face she had made when she had read the second page.
Maren Voss. He had known her then. He had known her before she had known herself. He had known her when she was a girl, and he had been a different man, and the world had been a different place. He had not seen her since the ditch. He had not wanted to see her since the ditch. He had hoped, in the way that men hope against their own judgment, that she had died in the burning, that she had been spared the long slow work of becoming what the war had needed her to become.
She had not died. She had become. And now she was out there, in the marsh, leading a column of refugees, and he was here, in the water, leading a column of soldiers, and the two columns were moving toward the same city from opposite directions, and one of them was going to arrive first.
He moved through the water. The cold was a living thing. It crawled up his legs and into his chest and tried to stop his heart. He kept moving. Behind him, the two hundred men kept moving. The current helped. The darkness helped. The sound of the water covered every other sound.
In the second hour, the water rose to his chest. In the third hour, it rose to his shoulders. He swam, then, with one hand, and kept his sword in the other, and the men behind him swam or waded or were carried, and the ones who could not swim were held up by the ones who could, and the ones who fell were left behind, because there was no other choice, because the alternative was to die together in the dark.
By the fourth hour, the tunnel mouth was ahead. Drego felt the current change. The water narrowed. The walls rose. The sound echoed and re-echoed. He raised his hand. The column stopped.