them. The soldiers began working in the trench behind us while we walked all the long curve of the wall to the southern end, to make the second opening.
By the time we finished the second tunnel, Marek’s men had begun to try the outer wall, not very seriously yet: they were lobbing over burning rags soaked in lamp-oil, small thorny bits of iron with spikes pointing in every direction. But that almost made the baron’s soldiers happier. They stopped watching me and Sarkan like we were poisonous snakes, and began comfortably bawling out orders and making siege-preparations, work they all plainly knew well.
There wasn’t a place for us among them; we were only in their way. I didn’t try to speak to any of them, after all; I silently followed the Dragon back to the tower.
—
He shut the great doors behind us, the thump of the bar falling into the iron braces echoing against the marble. The entry and the great hall were unchanged, the unwelcoming narrow wooden benches standing against the walls, the hanging lamps above. Everything as stiff and formal as the first day I’d come wandering through here with my tray of food, so frightened and alone. Even the baron preferred to sleep outside with his men in the warm weather. I could hear their voices outside through the arrow-slit windows, but only faintly, as if they came from far away. Some of the soldiers were singing a song together, a bawdy song probably, but full of glad working rhythm. I couldn’t make out the words.
“We’ll have a little quiet, at least,” Sarkan said, turning from the doors, towards me. He wiped a hand across his forehead, streaking a clean line through the fine layer of grey stone dust clinging to his skin; his hands were stained with green powder and iridescent traces of oil that shone in the lamp-light. He looked down at them with a grimace of distaste, at the loose sleeves of his work-shirt coming unrolled.
For a moment we might have been alone in the tower again, just the two of us with no armies waiting outside, no royal children hiding in the cellar, with the shadow of the Wood falling across our door. I forgot I was trying to be angry at him. I wanted to go into his arms and press my face into his chest and breathe him in, smoke and ash and sweat all together; I wanted to shut my eyes and have him put his arms around me. I wanted to rub handprints through his dust. “Sarkan,” I said.
“They’ll most likely attack at the first light of morning,” he said too quickly, cutting me off before I could say anything more. His face was as closed up as the doors. He stepped back from me and gestured at the stairs. “The best thing you can do at the moment is get some sleep.”
Chapter 27
What perfectly sensible advice. It sat in my stomach, an indigestible lump. I went down to the cellars to lie down with Kasia and the children, and curled up quietly seething around it. Their small even breaths came behind me. The sound should have been comforting; instead it just taunted me: They’re asleep and you aren’t! The cellar floor couldn’t cool my feverish skin.
My body remembered the endless day; I’d woken up that morning on the other side of the mountains, and I still felt the echoes of hoofbeats on stone behind me, coming closer, the strain of my panicked breaths struggling against my ribs as I’d run with Marisha in my arms. I had bruises where her heels had banged against the sides of my legs. I should have been spent. But magic was still alive and shivering in my belly, too much of it with nowhere to go, as if I were an over-ripe tomato that wanted to burst its skin for relief, and there was an army outside our doors.
I didn’t think Solya had spent the evening preparing defenses and sleep spells. He’d fill our trenches with white fire, and tell Marek where to point the cannon so they would kill the most men. He was a war-wizard; he’d been at dozens of battles, and Marek had the entire army of Polnya behind him, six thousand men to our six hundred. If we didn’t stop them; if Marek came through the walls we’d built and smashed the doors, killed us all and took the children—
I threw off the covers and got up. Kasia’s