I turned to look, everyone around me running. Piper saw me looking, and turned, too.
There were hundreds of them, devouring the horizon with their galloping hoofs. Mounted soldiers in their red tunics, leaving the sunrise behind them as they raced toward the town. They would be on top of us in minutes.
We were outnumbered—five to one, at least. Whatever hope our makeshift army had been able to muster, it was finished now. This was where my visions of blood on snow had been leading. This was how it would end.
I thought of Zach, and wondered if he felt his death approaching. When I pictured him, it was his face as a child that I saw. His wary eyes, watching everything I did. The way he’d cover his face with his arm when sleeping, as if hiding his dreams from the night’s gaze. It had been years since Zach and I had shared anything, but as the soldiers rode closer I thought of him, and it was easier, somehow, knowing that we would at least share our deaths.
I heard Piper swear, and Zoe call back to him, and her voice stop midshout as she saw the soldiers coming. And I was sorry that this would be their end, too. At least, I thought, they were near each other. It seemed right that they would lie together at the end, their blood mixed.
The Council soldiers at the gate were calling out, too, a whoop of relief and renewed vigor. When I heard their shouts, I realized how close we had come. They’d been afraid. We might have taken the town after all. It was luck, in the end, that had turned the battle against us. A messenger who managed to slip out, past our archers. Or perhaps reinforcements had been due anyway, in preparation for the tanking of the townsfolk. On such small things, so many lives would turn. We might have freed the town. Now we could not.
I hoped it would be quick. No torture, and no tank.
I saw that Piper had turned to watch me. He had planted his sword in the ground before him, and instead held one of his small knives in his hand. It was pointing at me, not the oncoming riders.
I knew that he would do it, if the soldiers reached us. I wasn’t surprised, or even afraid. The sudden steel of the knife in the throat—a gush of hot blood. An act of mercy, like my knife in the horse’s neck. Better than the cell and the tanks. He saw me looking, and he made no pretense, didn’t move to hide his knife, or avert his gaze. I gave him a slow nod. I didn’t have it in me to smile, but it was as close to a thanks as I could muster. Kip had given me his death, for my life. Piper would give me my death, and I would be grateful, in the end.
The soldiers at the gate held back now. There was no rush—soon enough we would be trapped between them and the reinforcements, pounding up the eastern road. The percussion of hoofs made the frozen earth shift underfoot. They were only a hundred yards away now. Piper was watching me, Zoe watching him. I closed my eyes.
But the noises that reached me were wrong. I felt as though sound had come unmoored. The cries and shouts were coming from the wrong place: from our right, at the eastern gate of the town.
The riders had not left the road to charge to where we clustered at the south of the wall. Instead, they’d stayed on course for the eastern gate. From within the mass of riders, a row of bows was raised. The first arrows fell on the sentry tower at the eastern gate. Then the riders caught up with the arrows, and grappling irons were hurled over the gate itself. The gate was lightly manned; most of the occupying soldiers were at the southern gate, holding us off. Already the arriving fighters had thrown a ladder against the eastern watchtower.
I saw him then: the Ringmaster, at the center of the mounted mass of soldiers. He carried a sword but was busy directing his soldiers, shouting and pointing, bending sometimes to confer with those around him.
Part of the eastern gate was aflame. More arrows buried themselves in the watchtower. There was a scream, and a body dropped from the tower, lodging on the top of the smoldering gate. With a shriek of