Frost rimed the stone beneath Sera Veylan's palms, sharp as ground glass where the battlements met the morning air. She pressed her fingers flat against the parapet and counted.
One campfire. Two. Three. The Verdant host stretched along the treeline in a ragged crescent, orange sparks lifting into a dawn that had not yet decided whether to be grey or gold. She had begun at the eastern flank, where the river bent and the pines grew thick enough to swallow cavalry, and worked her way west along the curtain wall. By the time the sun cracked the horizon, her lips were blue and her count had climbed past two hundred and seventy individual fires, each one a hundred men by the scouts' estimate. Each one an enemy.
Two thousand seven hundred. Perhaps three thousand, if the hidden cookfires along the road had grown overnight.
Behind her, the keep of Ashford waited in silence. Its central spire, the only one the Verdant had not yet burned, caught the first pale wash of daylight and bled it down the stonework in long, cold streaks. From where Sera stood, the village of Ashwick was a smudge of smoke at the foot of the hill. Her sister's voice rose faintly from the smithy yard, calling the other children to morning chores.
Sera did not turn to look. If she looked at the village, she would think about Mira, and if she thought about Mira, she would think about the cellar under the forge where the old iron chest sat locked with a key Sera did not have and a sigil she had only ever seen once, in her mother's dying hand.
She counted another cluster of fires. Eleven of them, banked low and tight where the road dipped into a shallow ravine. Discipline. Whoever commanded the Verdant host understood how to hide his numbers and conserve his fuel, which meant he understood how to wait. That was the worst kind of enemy.
A bell rang once, low and bronze, from the chapel tower within the keep. Someone was stirring in the chapel. Sera glanced at the east window and saw a flicker of candlelight, gone almost before it registered.
The commander of the royal garrison would be inside that chapel. Commander Caelum Draeven, they called him. A grey man with grey eyes who spoke to the garrison as if each soldier were a misbehaving hound and who had, until three days ago, refused to acknowledge that Ashford Keep could be besieged at all. Sera had delivered horseshoes to his quartermaster for six years. He had never once learned her name.
She had learned his. She had learned a great many things about him that he did not know she knew.
The cold worked into the bones of her wrists. She flexed her hands, the calluses along her palms cracking with a sound like old parchment, and turned her attention back to the enemy camp.
They had been there for nine days. The first night, Sera had stood on this same battlement and felt nothing but the bitter pleasure of being right. The villages to the east had emptied overnight, the roads clogged with refugees who told tales of Verdant scouts with green-dyed cloaks and curved swords, of a captain who moved without sound. The second night, she had felt the first cold thread of fear wind itself through her chest. By the fifth night, she had begun to catalogue supplies. By the seventh, she had set aside her own portion of dried meat and grain in a sack beneath her bunk, because the quartermaster's ledgers said there was food for forty days and the quartermaster was a liar.
Now, on the ninth dawn, she felt something she could not name. Not fear, not anger, not hope. Something older than all three, something that lived in the scar across her left shoulder and the dreams she refused to remember.
The Verdant fires were dimming. The morning muster was over. Men were filing out of camp in disciplined columns, four abreast, the green of their cloaks making the snow-patched fields look wounded.
Sera tracked the head of the column. The banner came into view last, carried by a rider at the center of the line. She could not make out the device from this distance, but she could see the way the men moved around it: carefully, as though the standard itself were a flame they did not wish to scorch themselves on.
"A shadowblade captain," she murmured, though there was no one to hear. "In all the songs I never learned."
A creak of rope and iron announced the arrival of someone at the wall-walk below. Sera did not startle. She had heard the footsteps before they reached the stair, had counted them out by the rhythm, had placed the gait as either too heavy for a page or too light for any of the garrison knights she had trained herself to recognize.
The footsteps stopped.
"You are not supposed to be up here."
The voice belonged to a young man, smooth where Draeven's was rough, with the careful diction of someone who had been taught to choose his words as if each one might be marked against him later. Sera knew the voice before she turned. She had served him cold tea in the keep's kitchen, two summers past, when his father had sent him to the Northern Reach and the boy-prince had arrived with a single trunk and a face like a held breath.
Sera turned.
Prince Aldric Voss stood at the top of the stair, his cloak pinned at the throat with a brass rose, his hands bare despite the cold. He was taller than she remembered, or perhaps she had been younger when she had last seen him. His eyes, which she recalled as a soft grey, looked darker in the early light.
"Your Highness," she said, and offered the bow a serving girl gives a guest who has wandered into the wrong pantry. She straightened before he could wave her lower.
"You are not supposed to be up here," he said again, as if the repetition might shame her.
"No, Your Highness."
"Then why are you?"
Sera gestured, without turning, at the field beyond the wall.
"Counting."
He came to stand beside her, the toes of his boots a careful inch from the parapet's edge. The cold did not appear to touch him. She wondered, briefly, whether courtiers were taught to walk through weather the way they were taught to walk through conversation.
"I have been trying to count them myself," he said. "The quartermaster's report says two thousand. The scouts' report says four. Both reports were written by the same man, on the same morning."
"And what does Commander Draeven say?"
Aldric's mouth thinned. "He says I should be inside the keep, learning the names of the men who will die for me."
Sera considered this. The wind shifted, bringing with it the smell of woodsmoke and wet pine and the faintest thread of something herbal, sweet and cloying, that did not belong to any fire she had ever smelled before. She filed it away.
"And what do you say, Your Highness?"
He looked at her directly then, and she saw the crack he tried to keep polished shut. "I say there is a captain out there whose name I do not know, and that frightens me more than the number of his men."
Sera returned her gaze to the field. The green column had reached the edge of bowshot. The banner dipped once, twice, and the line halted. The rider with the standard dismounted and walked forward alone, until he stood in the open space between the host and the keep's outer wall.
He was not, Sera realized, looking at the keep.
He was looking up at the battlements. At her.
The morning light caught the edge of something curved at his hip, a blade with no crossguard, and for one long breath the wind carried that cloying sweetness to her again, closer now, threaded through with the iron tang of old blood.
Sera did not look away.
"The name of his captain," she said, quieter than she had meant to. "The shadowblade. Do the songs mention any of them at all?"
Aldric shook his head. "The songs only mention the ones we have already survived."
Below, the rider turned his horse and rode back to the column. The banner lifted. The line reformed, this time not toward the keep but eastward, toward the road, toward the river bend where the pinewood swallowed cavalry and the cookfires burned low and disciplined.
Sera watched them go and thought, with the strange old clarity that lived in her scar, that she had just been seen by the man who would kill her, and that he had chosen not to do it yet.
Behind her, the chapel bell rang a second time. A door banged somewhere in the lower bailey. And from the stair at her back came a third set of footsteps, heavier than the prince's, slower than either of theirs, the cadence of a man who expected to be obeyed before he opened his mouth.
Lord Maren Voss did not wait for Sera to turn.
"The prince told you to speak with the men. Not to climb."
The voice arrived before its owner, low and gravel-edged, carrying the clipped weight of a man who had spent forty winters giving orders to mountains. Sera heard Aldric straighten beside her, the faint creak of his breastplate as he squared his shoulders, and she understood before she saw it that the Warden of the Northern Reach was not speaking to his son.
"The wall is where I told the guard to remain," Maren Voss continued, and now his boots appeared on the topmost stair, mud-crusted, square-toed, planted with the deliberation of a man who chose every step. "There are reasons for orders, girl. Even ones you find inconvenient."
Sera turned. She had meant to be calm, to offer the measured response a ward of the keep might give, but the name caught in her throat like a fishbone, and what came out instead was a flat, "My lord."
He was shorter than she had expected. White-haired, but not old in the way the village elders were old, not soft at the edges. His eyes were the same gray as Aldric's, and just as capable of looking through a person as at them. He wore no sword. He wore no armor. He carried, instead, a walking stick of dark ashwood, and he leaned on it only slightly, the way a man leans on something he would rather not put down.
"Father." Aldric's voice was careful, formal, the voice he used when the Warden was in earshot. "She has earned her place on the wall. The men will say otherwise if you make a scene of it."
"Then the men will be reminded of who keeps their bellies full and their beds warm." Maren Voss did not raise his tone. He did not need to. His gaze returned to Sera, and something in it snagged, a flicker, gone before she could name it. "You have your mother's jaw."
The words landed without context. Sera felt the scar along her cheek go tight.
"I do not recall my mother, my lord."
"No. You would not." He turned from her then, dismissing her with the ease of long practice, and addressed his son. "There is a council at dusk. Be dressed. And do not bring the Veylan girl. She has work to do."
He descended. The sound of his stick on each step was even, patient, the rhythm of a man who had measured the height of every stair in the keep.
Aldric let out a breath he had been holding since the second bell.
"Ignore him. He is afraid, and afraid men name the wrong things."
Sera said nothing. She was still looking at the stairwell, at the place where the Warden's shadow had been, and the scar on her cheek thrummed with something she did not have a word for. It was not anger. It was older than anger. It was the feeling of being recognized by someone who had no right to recognize her.
She touched the scar with two fingers. The skin was warm. It always warmed when she was near the Warden, a fact she had never told anyone, a fact that lived now in the same locked box where she kept the other strange things about herself.
"The council at dusk," she said. "What council?"
Aldric hesitated. It was the kind of hesitation she had learned to read, the pause of a man choosing between loyalty to his father and loyalty to something newer, less certain.
"There is a raiding party," he said at last. "Tonight. To burn a siege engine they have built east of the river. The commander is Caelum Draeven. Father has refused to let me go. He has refused to let me go every time."
"Who is going?"
"The Black Guard. Twenty men. And your friend from the stables, the one with the broken teeth."
"Bren."
"Bren." Aldric looked at her, and for an instant his cultivated face forgot its training. "Sera. They will not let you on the wall and they will not let me past the gate. Between the two of us, we have done nothing useful all morning. If you wanted to be on the wall, then you should be on the wall. But if you wanted to do something else, something that might actually matter, then tonight is the night."
She looked at him a long time. The chapel bell had stopped. A sparrow had landed on the merlon beside her and was preening, indifferent to the war below.
"You want me to ask."
"I want you to decide. And then I want you to tell me what you decided."
She almost smiled.
"I will be ready by ten."
She did not sleep. She sat on the edge of her cot in the lower bailey barracks and watched the candle burn down to a stub, and she thought about trebuchets, and about her mother's jaw, and about the Warden of the Northern Reach knowing her name before she had ever spoken it. She thought about the smell of the shadowblades. She thought about how a man could choose not to kill you and leave you more afraid than if he had.
When Bren came for her, he brought a short sword, a dark cloak, and a strip of boiled leather to tie back her hair.
"The captain says keep your hood up till we cross the ford. After that, do what you like."
"Does the captain know I am coming?"
"The captain suggested it." Bren spat into the mud. "The captain suggested it twice. The Warden said no both times. The captain suggested it a third time with a different set of words and the Warden went to bed."
The night was moonless and smelled of wet pine and distant smoke. The Black Guard moved along the river in a line of two, their cloaks the same gray-brown as the bank, their breathing the only sound until the ford, where the water was knee-deep and so cold it made Sera's teeth ache. Commander Caelum Draeven stood at the ford's edge with his back to them, watching the far tree line. He did not turn when they came up.
He was a broad man, shorter than Sera had expected, with the heavy shoulders of someone who had carried other men off battlefields. His face was a closed thing, all planes and shadow, and his voice when he spoke was the rough, low sound of a door scraping open.
"The girl is with us."
It was not a question. It was a sentence that pretended to be one. Sera kept her hood low and said nothing.
"She stays behind the line until the engine is lit. Then she runs like the rest of us. If she does not run like the rest of us, I will carry her myself and she will not enjoy it."
"Understood, Commander."
"You do not understand anything yet." He turned then, and his eyes were the same flat gray as the Warden's, but where Maren Voss's gaze had been cold, Draeven's was merely tired. "But you will."
The pinewood closed over them like water. They moved for an hour in silence, the only light the faint green phosphorescence of rotting logs, the only sound the careful placement of twenty boots on ground that wanted to give them away. Sera counted her breaths. She counted the men's heads. She counted the times Bren's hand drifted to his sword, a tic she had not known he had.
The Verdant trebuchet rose out of the dark like a ribcage. It was enormous, taller than the chapel at Ashwick, its counterweight cage empty, its throwing arm lashed down against the wind. Around it, cookfires burned low in a rough half-circle, and between the fires sat perhaps forty men, and between the men moved three figures in dark cloaks whose feet made no sound at all.
Shadowblades.
Draeven had seen them too. He raised a fist. The line halted.
"Listen," he breathed, and Sera listened, and what she heard was nothing, which was the worst thing she could have heard. The three cloaked figures were not speaking to each other. They were not shifting their weight. They were not breathing in any pattern she could follow. They stood like posts. They waited like doors.
Draeven drew his sword. The sound it made leaving the scabbard was the loudest thing in the wood.
"On my mark, the torchbearers go left. The rest of you hold. You hold until you hear the first one scream. Then you cut the lashings and you light the arm. Do not engage the cloaked ones unless you have to. If you have to, do not expect to live."
The torchbearers peeled off. Sera watched them go, two men and a woman, moving low through the bracken with brands that had not yet been lit. The dark felt thicker without them. The mud squelched under her boots and she thought, absurdly, about how it would smell by morning.
The mark came. It was not a word. It was the sound of a man's heel snapping a twig.
The wood erupted.
The torches bloomed orange against the black. The first shadowblade moved faster than Sera could track, a streak of dark cloth and brighter dark, and the torchbearer nearest to it screamed once and went down. The second shadowblade met one of the Black Guard in the open, and the sound of their blades meeting was not the clang of steel but something lower, wetter, like a branch being slowly broken.
Sera ran.
She ran the way Bren had taught her, low and hard, planting each foot as if she meant to drive it through the ground. The lashings on the throwing arm were thick hemp, waxed against weather, and she sawed at the first one with her short sword while a man she did not know held a torch against the joint where the rope met the frame. The rope did not want to cut. Her arms burned. The mud at her knees was cold and stank of iron and old rain.
A shadowblade came for her.
She did not see it arrive. She saw only the sudden absence of the man with the torch, the way the orange light guttered and spat and went out, and then the absence of everything, the world reduced to a circle of dark no wider than her own shoulders, and inside that circle the smell of that cloying sweetness, closer now than it had ever been on the wall.
She raised her sword. She did not know how she knew to raise it. The strike came from her left and her blade met it by accident, by reflex, by some old and unnamed thing that lived in the muscle of her forearm. The impact jarred her wrist to the shoulder. The shadowblade made a sound, a small disappointed sound, like a man whose favorite chair had been taken.
It came again. She could not see it. She could only feel it, the displacement of air, the wrongness of a body where no body should have been. She stepped back. Her boot found a root and she went down hard, the small of her back slamming into a stone, and the shadowblade's blade whispered past her throat close enough to move the fine hairs there.
Then Bren was there. Then two of the Black Guard were there. Then the trebuchet arm was alight, the hemp catching in a slow bright roar that lit the clearing like a false dawn, and in that light Sera saw the shadowblade for the first time, a tall thin shape with no face she could read, retreating into the bracken with a wound across its shoulder that was already closing as she watched.
Across the burning engine, on the far side of the half-circle of cookfires, a man stood alone.
He wore no cloak. He wore no armor. He wore a long coat the color of dried leaves, and his hair was cut close, and his hands hung at his sides as if he had never needed to raise them. He was watching her. He had been watching her the whole time. She could tell by the way he did not startle at the fire, by the way his weight was settled, by the way his chin was already angled toward the exact place where she had fallen.
He did not move toward her. He did not call out. He did not draw a blade. He only looked, and in the light of the burning trebuchet his face was calm, and cold, and utterly unsurprised.
Sera stared back. Her wrist throbbed. Her back ached. The mud was in her hair and under her nails and the taste of iron was thick at the back of her throat.
He did not raise his hand.
She did not raise hers.
Draeven's voice cut the dark. "Fall back. Now. All of you. Now."
The Black Guard broke from the engine like birds from a net. Sera ran because her legs ran. Bren caught her elbow at the ford and hauled her across without a word, and the water was so cold it felt like a second skin, and behind them the trebuchet burned on, a tower of red against the black pine, and behind the trebuchet the man in the leaf-colored coat stood where he had stood, watching them go.
She did not see him move.
She did not see him leave.
When they reached the keep, the chapel was silent and the courtyard smelled of horse and ash. Draeven walked her to the lower bailey door and stopped.
"You are not to speak of the man by the engine."
"I did not see a man by the engine."
"Good." He looked at her then, and for the first time something in his face was not flat or tired but something older, something careful. "He saw you, though. He always sees. That is what he is for."
"What is he for?"
Draeven did not answer. He turned on his heel and was gone into the dark of the yard, his boots heavy on the flagstones, and Sera stood in the doorway with her sword still in her hand and the taste of the river in her mouth and the Warden's words, unasked for and unburied, turning in her chest like a key in a lock she had not known was there.
She had been seen twice today. Once on the wall by a rider who could have killed her. Once in the mud by a man who could have killed her.
Both times, she had been left alive. Both times, she could not say why.
She slept in the chapel that night because the lower bailey smelled of horse and ash and something older she did not want to name. Bren found her there before dawn and laid a wool blanket over her without speaking, and when she woke the light through the lancet windows was the color of weak tea and the bells in the gatehouse had begun their slow tolling, one note at a time, the way bells always tolled when something was coming that could not be turned.
She had dreamed of the man in the leaf-colored coat. In the dream he had stood in the river where she had crossed, and the water had parted around his boots like water knew him, and he had smiled at her with a mouth she could not see. She woke with the taste of iron in her teeth.
By midmorning the bells had stopped and a different sound had begun. Hooves, far off, on the road from the south, and then closer, and then the gate sergeant's horn, one long note and two short, the call for a banner entering friendly.
Sera climbed to the parapet above the inner gate because that was where the watch always climbed when something was entering that ought not to be there. The wind off the moors was sharp and carried the smell of wet heather and the deeper smell of iron from the enemy lines below. From the parapet she could see the road winding up out of the dell, and on it, moving at a walk because the horses were spent, came a small column of riders with the blue and silver of House Voss at their head.
Thirty men. She counted twice.
The column entered the gate in pieces, hooves loud on the cobbles, and the rider at the head of them wore no armor at all, only a scholar's riding coat of fine grey wool, mud to the knee, and he sat his horse as though he had been riding for days and had forgotten how to be tired. He had a narrow face and dark hair and eyes that found her on the parapet before anyone else had even thought to look up, and he lifted one hand in a small salute that was not quite military and not quite courtly, and she did not know what to do with it so she did nothing.
Prince Aldric Voss. Crown Prince of the Northern Reach, second son of Lord Maren, trained for the scriptorium and the council chamber and not at all for this. The men behind him were half of them wounded and the other half looked like they wished they were. Among them, on a grey mare, rode Commander Caelum Draeven with his jaw set like a man biting down on something he did not intend to swallow.
The yard was quiet in the way yards are quiet when no one knows what to say. Sera watched from above as Aldric dismounted, and a boy came forward to take his bridle, and Aldric gave the boy a coin she could not see and a word she could not hear, and then he looked up at the parapet again, and this time he did not salute, he only looked, and she felt the look like a hand laid on the back of her neck.
She did not go down to him. She went and found the captain of the wall watch and the steward of the hall and the woman who kept the keys to the undercroft, and she told each of them in turn what she had seen the night before, and what Draeven had said, and what she thought it meant, and none of them answered her except the steward who said, "The Prince has come, child. The Prince has come, and we are no longer alone."
"That's not what I asked."
"No," the steward said, and went on with her counting.
Sera found him on the parapet at the hour before noon. She had not gone looking for him. She had gone to look at the enemy lines from the western merlon, because that was where the wind came from and because the man in the leaf-colored coat had stood there the night before, and she had thought she might understand something if she stood where he had stood. Aldric was already there. He had changed the muddied scholar's coat for a leather jerkin that did not fit him across the shoulders, and he was looking out at the plain the way one looks at a thing one cannot make smaller by looking.
"My uncle sent word at dawn," he said, without turning. "By his own courier, with his own seal, and the order was to fall back to the river fort and let Ashwick burn as a lesson to the rest."
"And you did not."
"No."
"Thirty men, my lord. Against what we can count below."
"I know what we can count below." He turned then, and she saw that the careful court mask he had worn since boyhood had cracked in three places, and through the cracks came something younger and less sure. "I was not trained for this. I was trained to read treaties and to speak softly in rooms where soft speaking worked. I know that. I have always known that. But the order was wrong, and I could not ride away from an order that was wrong and call myself anything I wanted to be called afterward."
"You could call yourself alive."
"Yes." He said it as if the word surprised him. "I could."
Below them, the wind shifted, and Sera smelled the cook-fires of the besiegers and the sharper smell of the pitch they were heating in the forward trenches. She heard the creak of the great ram being wheeled forward on its shielded cart, a sound like a ship's hull under stress, and the answering creak of our own gate as it took the weight of the braced timbers inside.
"My lord," she said. "The ram will strike in a quarter-hour. I have counted their pace. If you have brought thirty men, you have brought them to die in this keep and not to save it, and the village below will burn whether we die here or not, because the fire comes from the trebuchet first and the gates second and the men third."
"I know the order."
"You do not know what I am asking."
"No." He turned to face her fully. The wind pulled at his hair and the unaccustomed jerkin sat wrong on his shoulders and his eyes were the eyes of a boy who had not slept and would not admit it. "Tell me what you are asking."
"Take your thirty men down the goat track behind the smithy. Take the women and children with you, and the old, and the wounded we cannot carry we will leave here with water and a quick death. Take them to the river fort, and from the river fort send word south for what reinforcements the Reach can spare, and live to be the kind of prince who comes back."
"And the keep?"
"Will fall. Was always going to fall. The question is whether it falls with anything left of you inside it."
He was quiet for so long she thought he had not heard. Below them a flight of arrows rose from the enemy line, black against the white of the cloud, and fell in a long arc into the ward, and the watch ducked and one man cursed and another laughed because laughing was easier than not.
"You speak as if you have read this before," Aldric said.
"I have lived this before. Smaller. A village, not a keep. Men who came with fewer than they should have, and a road that went one way only." She did not look at him when she said it. She looked out at the ram, which was fifty yards out and closing. "I was the child on the road."
"Then you know what I will say."
"Yes." She did look at him then. "That is why I am asking."
The ram struck. The sound came up through the stone under their feet like a pulse, and the gate shuddered in its hinges, and from the yard below she heard the shout of the men at the braces and the higher shout of the watch telling them to hold. Another flight of arrows rose, and another, and the air over the ward was stippled with falling black, and somewhere a horse screamed because a shaft had found it.
Aldric had gone very still. She saw him weigh it in his face, the thirty men and the goat track and the children and the river fort, and she saw the moment when the weighing was done.
"No," he said. "Not yet. Not while there is a chance the gate holds an hour more. The gate holds, and we speak again. The gate does not hold, and we speak of the goat track."
"That is not what I asked for."
"No." He almost smiled. "It is not."
A stone arched up from the enemy line, lobbed by a hand-sling, and struck the merlon two paces from where she stood, and chips of stone flew into her hair and one cut her above the brow and the blood ran warm into her eye. She did not wipe it. She looked at him through it, and he looked back, and neither of them moved.
Then she nodded, once, and stepped back from the parapet, and went down the inner stairs to the yard where the men at the braces were calling for water and more water and for the love of any god who was listening, more water, and she took her place among them with the cut above her brow still open and the taste of her own blood in her mouth and the Warden's word still turning in her chest.
The ram struck again. The gate took it.
Sera set her shoulder to the timber beside the others and pushed back.