reason he never came down into the valley. I didn’t need him to tell me that he couldn’t come to Olshanka and dance the circle without putting down his own roots, and he didn’t want them. He’d kept himself apart for a century behind these stone walls full of old magic. Maybe he would let me come in, but he’d want to close the doors up again behind me. He’d done it before, after all. I’d made myself a rope of silk dresses and magic to get out, but I couldn’t make him climb out the window if he didn’t want to.
I sat up away from him. His hand had slipped from my hair. I pushed apart the stifling bedcurtains and slid out of the bed, taking one of the coverlets with me to wrap around me. I went to the window and pushed the shutters open and put my head and shoulders out into the open night air, wanting the breeze on my face. It didn’t come; the air around the tower was still. Very still.
I stopped, my hands braced on the stone sill. It was the middle of the night, still pitch-dark, most of the cooking-fires gone out or banked for the night. I couldn’t see anything down on the ground. I listened for the old stone voices of the walls we’d built, and heard them murmuring, disturbed.
I hurried back to the bed and shook Sarkan awake. “Something’s wrong,” I said.
We scrambled into our clothes, vanastalem spinning clean skirts up from my ankles and lacing a fresh bodice around my waist. He was cupping a soap-bubble between his hands, a small version of one of his sentinels, giving it a message: “Vlad, rouse your men, quickly: they’re trying something under cover of night.” He blew it out the window and we ran; by the time we reached the library, torches and lanterns were being lit all through the trenches below.
There were almost none in Marek’s camp, though, except the ones held by the handful of guards, and one lamp shining inside his pavilion. “Yes,” Sarkan said. “He’s doing something.” He turned to the table: he’d laid out half a dozen volumes of defensive magic. But I stayed at the window and stared down, frowning. I could feel the gathering of magic that had a flavor of Solya, but there was something else, something moving slow and deep. I still couldn’t see anything. Only a few guards on their rounds.
Inside Marek’s pavilion, a shape passed between the lantern and the tent wall and flung a shadow against the wall, a face in profile: a woman’s head, hair piled high, and the sharp peaks of the circlet she wore. I jerked back from the window, panting, as if she’d seen me. Sarkan looked back at me, surprised.
“She’s here,” I said. “The queen is here.”
There wasn’t time to think what it meant. Marek’s cannon roared out with gouts of orange fire, a horrible noise, and clods of dirt went flying as the first cannon-balls smashed into the outer wall. I heard Solya give a great shout, and light blazed up all across Marek’s camp: men were thrusting coals into beds of straw and kindling that they had laid down in a line.
A wall of flame leaped up to face my wall of stone, and Solya stood behind it: his white robe was stained with orange and red light, blowing out from his wide-spread arms. His face was clenched with strain, as if he were lifting something heavy. I couldn’t hear the words over the roar of the fire, but he was speaking a spell.
“Try to do something about that fire,” Sarkan told me, after one quick look down. He whirled back to his table and pulled out one of the dozen scrolls he’d prepared yesterday, a spell to blunt cannon-fire.
“But what—” I began, but he was already reading, the long tangled syllables flowing like music, and I was out of time for questions. Outside, Solya bent his knees and heaved up his arms as if he were throwing a large ball. The whole wall of flame jumped into the air and curved up over the wall and into the trench where the baron’s men crouched.
Their screams and cries rose up with the crackling of the flames, and for a moment I was frozen. The sky was wide and too-clear above, stars from end to end, not a cloud anywhere that I could wring rain from. I ran for the water-jug in