The horn woke me, and it was still going.
That was the part my body understood before the rest of me did. Marchgate’s watch horns are short. One note for a cart, two for a rider, three for something worth putting down your bread for, and all of them stop. This one had started before I opened my eyes and it hadn’t stopped since, and somewhere underneath it a second horn had joined, and then a third, until the sound stacked into one flat unbroken shout that came through the timber of the shelter and up through the boards into my back.
I was outside with Duskfang in my hand before I knew I’d stood up.
The yard was already wrong. Not panicked. Wrong the way a room’s wrong when everyone in it has quit doing the thing they were doing at the same moment. A woman with a slate board stood in the middle of the roster she’d been calling with the chalk still against it. The carters had left their carts. A boy was running for the inner arch with two full buckets and hadn’t thought to put them down.
“Up,” Tamsin said, going past me. She didn’t stop, and she didn’t tell me twice.
I went up.
The stair to the eastern wall walk is thirty-one steps. I counted them once, weeks ago, the way you count a thing you expect to climb for a long time. I took them four at a time with my shoulder complaining and my heart doing something ugly, and the whole way up the horns kept going, and I kept waiting for the sound to break the way a warning breaks when the danger has been named and answered.
It didn’t break.
Men were coming up behind me and past me. Golden Host in half-armour with their straps still open, militia with their fathers’ spears, a fletcher’s apprentice carrying an armload of shafts against his chest like firewood. Nobody shoved. That was the strangest part, and I remembered it afterward more clearly than most of what came later: three hundred people going up a stair built for a dozen, and nobody shoved.
Elowen came up in the middle of them against the flow, going down, her white and gold already pushed to the elbows.
“Where are they putting the wounded?” I asked her.
“The chapel and the two long rooms at the Flagon.” She didn’t slow either. “Ask me again in an hour and I’ll tell you the street.”
Then I came out onto the wall walk into the grey and the wind, and I stopped, and so did every man who came up after me, and the horns went on and on above us.
The mist was lifting off the eastern fields the way it does at that hour, in long slow sheets that tear and reform, and what it was tearing off wasn’t a raiding party.
I want to be accurate about this, because I’ve heard the story told since and the story is wrong in a specific way. It doesn’t begin with fear. It begins with arithmetic. My eye went out to the treeline and started counting the way you count sheep in a field, in blocks, and got to something over a hundred before I understood that I was counting one block of a line that ran the whole visible width of the eastern approach, and that the line had depth behind it, and that the depth went back into the mist where the counting stopped meaning anything at all.
Then the fear arrived, and it wasn’t the hot kind. It was cold and very quiet and it felt almost like being told a piece of bad news politely.
“Solara,” somebody said down the wall, not loudly.
“Get the ladders off the inner face,” Aldara said.
She’d come along the walk from the tower without my noticing, half-plate on, Oathkeeper at her hip, her grey hair flat with the wet. She wasn’t looking at the field. She was looking at her own wall, at the timber, at the ropes, at where her people were standing, and she’d already stopped caring what the number in the field was.
“Captain,” a young Host officer said, and then found he had nothing to put after it.
“I can see them.” She put a hand flat on his breastplate, not unkindly, and moved him one pace to his left so he was standing behind an upright instead of in a gap. “Shut the gate.”
The gate came down in pieces of sound. The counterweight chain first, a long ratcheting rattle that everyone on the wall heard and nobody looked at, then the two halves swinging in against each other, then the drop bar going home in its brackets with a note you felt through your boots.
Below it, men were already stacking the inner face with everything the yard had: the new timber from the repair, barrels of sand, a wagon turned onto its side and chocked. Dain Carver had a hand in it, still with the bandage on his forearm from the road, shouting at two boys to bring the sand and not the grain.
“That gate held four hundred at Rell’s Ford,” a militiaman said beside me. He said it to nobody. He said it the way you say a prayer you learned as a child.
“It’s a good gate,” I said, because he wanted somebody to say it.
Out on the field, the mass came forward and stopped, and the stopping was worse than the coming.
They did it in ranks. Not a rabble deciding together, the way goblins on the road decide together. Ranks, with intervals, with shields on the outside and bows behind and something with a hide roof being walked up in the centre by more hands than I could count. Somewhere in the middle of that a horn went, and it wasn’t one of ours: three notes, descending, unhurried, with a red cord swinging under it that I couldn’t possibly have seen at that distance and saw anyway, because I’d been waiting to see it since the road.
“Hesh,” I said.
“I heard it.” Tamsin had come up on my other side. She had her longsword drawn already, which she never did early. “He’s not commanding this.”
“He sounds like he is.”
“He’s keeping time.” She jerked her chin at the field without taking her eyes off it. “Listen. He calls, then they move. Something else decides and he tells them when. That’s a man doing a job for somebody.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that Hesh Three-Notes could be a subordinate. I turned that over and didn’t like the shape of it.
“Archers!” Aldara said.
The order went down the wall in voices, not in horns, because the horns were still going. Bows came up along four hundred feet of rampart, Golden Host longbows and militia hunting bows and one enormous ugly thing a woodsman had brought from the north road, and the fletcher’s apprentice went along the line dropping shafts into every quiver he could reach and then went back for more.
“Loose on my word. Not before.” Aldara had her hands on the parapet. “They’ll come at the gate. The gate is stone and iron and it does not care about them. Everything you kill on the way to it is a thing that doesn’t climb.”
Somebody down the wall laughed. It was a bad laugh, but it was a laugh, and four or five men caught it off him and it moved along the line and left them steadier than it found them.
Astarra hadn’t said anything.
She’d been in my palm since I woke, warm and awake and entirely silent, and I noticed it the way you notice a person in a room who has stopped talking. I put my hand on the parapet and waited for the amused remark about the size of the field, and it didn’t come, and the mark stayed warm, and that was all.
Below me, in the courtyard behind the gate, a woman was walking a line of buckets from the well to the wall base and setting them down in pairs. She had a child’s scarf around her hair. She had probably been doing that since the first horn. Nobody had told her to and nobody was going to tell her to stop, and every man who came off that wall burned or bleeding was going to be doused out of a bucket she’d carried.
The mass on the field started forward again.
“Now!” Aldara said, and four hundred feet of wall let go at once.
I’d thought I knew what a lot of arrows looked like. I’d watched Jak put six into a post at a hundred paces and thought that was archery.
Four hundred bows going off within a breath of each other doesn’t sound like arrows. It sounds like a sheet being torn somewhere enormous, and then, a long moment later, like rain arriving on a roof, except the roof is a field and the rain is going down into people.
The front of the goblin line came apart. Not evenly. In patches, the way a crowd comes apart, holes opening where a volley landed thick and closing again while I watched, because there was another rank behind that one and another behind that.
They came on through it. That was the thing nobody had prepared me for. Goblins on the road break when you hurt them. These took a volley that put down more of them than had attacked the whole road party in Rainmarch, and they closed up over their own and kept coming, and somewhere out there a horn told them when.
“Again!”
The second volley went. The third. By the fourth their bows were in range and the air over the wall changed.
The man who had told me about Rell’s Ford went down two feet from my elbow with a shaft through the throat and didn’t make any sound at all, and the arrow that took him had come at such a flat angle that I understood, distantly, that it’d been aimed. Someone out there had picked him.
“Shields up on the line!” Tamsin said. “Loose through the gaps. Do not lean out to look at what you hit.”
A militiaman leaned out to look at what he had hit. I got a hand on his belt and pulled him back and something went past close enough that I felt the air of it on my cheek and heard it strike the stone behind us.
“Thank you,” he said, and his teeth were chattering, and he went back to his bow.
It went on. That’s the honest word for it. It went on, and there was no cleverness in it, and my part was to stand in a gap on the wall walk with my sword in my hand and nothing to cut, hauling men back from the parapet and passing bundles of arrows along and helping carry the ones who stopped being able to stand. Twice I put my body between a bowman and the field because I could see a shaft coming that he couldn’t. Both times it was luck. I’d like to say otherwise.
Jak came along the walk at some point with his crossbow and no expression, going the other way, picking his shots at something below the wall that I couldn’t see and didn’t have time to ask about.
“How many have we lost?” I asked him.
“Ask Elowen.” He didn’t slow down. “She’s counting. I’m not.”
The hide-roofed thing reached the gate. I heard it more than saw it, one long grinding boom that came up through the wall into my knees, and then again, and again, on a slow count that never changed.
“Ram!” somebody said.
“Let them,” Aldara said. She hadn’t raised her voice all morning. “That gate has held rams since before your grandfather. Keep killing the ones who aren’t under the roof.”
And she was right, and I could feel that she was right, and along the wall you could feel the thing that’d been sitting in everyone’s chest since the mist lifted begin, very slightly, to let go. The volleys had a rhythm now. The wounded were going down the stair in an orderly line. The ram boomed and the gate didn’t care. Somebody was passing a waterskin along the parapet and men were actually drinking from it.
We were going to hold. You could hear people deciding it.
That was when the horn out on the field changed its call, and every goblin within a hundred feet of the gate turned and ran away from it.
Not routed. Ran, together, on the note, back through their own ranks and out to the sides, leaving the ground in front of the gate empty and the ram abandoned under its hide roof with its crew gone.
The whole wall stopped shooting, because there was nothing left in front of the gate to shoot at.
“Why would they.” The young Host officer had come back along the walk. “Captain, why would they clear their own?”
Aldara didn’t answer him, because she was looking, and by then so was I.
Something was coming up the empty ground toward our gate, and the ranks were opening for it, and it was walking alone.
She was small. That’s the first thing, and it stayed with me.
A goblin woman, old, walking up the cleared ground on her own two feet with no guard and no shield and no hurry, wrapped in something grey that dragged. She had a stick, and she wasn’t leaning on it. Her people had gone out of her way like water going around a stone, and behind her the whole eastern field had stopped moving, and out of every thousand of them not one made a sound.
“Kill her!” Aldara said.
The wall obliged. I’ve never seen shooting like it and I never will again, because every archer on that rampart had the same idea at the same moment and there was nothing else in front of them.
The volley went out and came apart in the air.
Not blocked. Apart. The shafts turned in flight about twenty feet from her, all of them, at the same instant, the way a flock turns, and went into the ground on either side of her and stood there in the mud quivering. She didn’t look at them. She didn’t look up at us at all. She stopped about sixty paces out, planted the stick, and put both hands on top of it.
“Again!” Aldara said, and her voice had changed.
The second volley did the same thing. The third, she didn’t even bother turning aside. It came down on her and stopped a body’s length above her head and hung there, four hundred arrows standing in the air like a hedge, and then dropped all at once into the dirt.
Somewhere behind me a man began saying the same word over and over.
The ground under the gate started to hum.
I felt it in my back teeth first, the way you feel a cart coming before you hear it. Then in the stone under my hands. Then in the timber of the wall walk, and then everywhere, and the pitch of it climbed, and dust began to come off the parapet in little jumping lines, and the water in the buckets down in the courtyard went white and fretted with it.
“Off the wall!” Tamsin said.
Nobody moved. Every man on that rampart was watching the old woman put her weight on a stick.
“OFF THE WALL!”
Aldara had her hand on my shoulder and was already turning me toward the stair. “Everyone off the gate span! Go! Get down, get behind the barricade, MOVE!”
We moved. Three hundred people came off four hundred feet of wall walk in the time it takes to describe it, and this time there was shoving, and I was carried down the last eight steps by the press with my feet barely touching, and the humming came up through everything until my jaw ached with it and the air itself felt tight, like the inside of a held breath.
At the bottom I got clear of the crush and turned and looked back up, which is why I saw it.
The old woman lifted her stick about a handspan off the ground and set it down again.
That was all she did.
The Ashward Gate came apart.
Not inward. Everywhere. Two leaves of oak eight inches thick and banded in iron, the drop bar, the brackets, the stone of the arch above them, the whole of it went out of shape and off in all directions at once with a noise I didn’t hear at the time and have never entirely stopped hearing since. The wagon they’d chocked against the inner face went end over end across the courtyard. The sand barrels burst. A block of the arch the size of a cart came down through the roof of the gatehouse and took the floor of it out. Every bucket that woman with the scarf had carried went over.
The pressure of it put me on my back thirty feet from where I’d been standing, and for a while after that there was a bright quiet with things falling through it.
I got up because someone stepped on my hand.
Where the gate had been there was a hole in Marchgate’s wall forty feet across, full of smoke and broken stone and daylight, and through the daylight, coming, was the entire eastern field.
The old woman was already walking back the way she’d come. She never crossed into the town at all. She’d done the one thing she came to do, and she went, and behind her everything that four volleys had left standing came into the hole she’d made.
Astarra, who had been silent all morning, spoke once.
There it is.
She didn’t sound surprised. She sounded like a woman recognising a face.
Nobody sent me.
I want that on the record, because of what people said afterward. There was no order. Aldara was somewhere in the smoke getting a line formed across the mouth of the market street with whatever she could reach, and Tamsin was pulling her eastern company off the wall stair by their collars, and the horns had finally stopped because the men blowing them were dead or busy, and in the middle of all of that there was a forty-foot hole with nothing standing in it.
I looked at it, and I did the arithmetic that anybody does, which is: how long before they’re past this and into the streets behind it, and what’s between them and the chapel where Elowen is putting the wounded.
The answer was nothing. The answer was a broken wagon and some sand.
So I went, and I wasn’t the first one there.
A woman was standing on the fallen block of the arch in fitted dark leathers with her black hair coming out of its tie, and as the first goblins came over the rubble she put one hand out and the air in front of the hole turned into a wall.
They hit it. I watched perhaps thirty of them hit something that wasn’t there and come off it, and the ones behind pushed the ones in front into it, and the pressure of it made her boots skid backward four inches through the grit.
“That won’t hold,” she said, to me, without turning around. She’d never seen me before.
“How long?”
“Ten breaths. Perhaps twelve.”
“Then we use them.”
I drew Duskfang. The mark went hot and the pact came up my arm without being asked, and the dark ran out along the edge and stayed there, and I stepped up onto the rubble beside her and put myself in the middle of the hole.
“Drop it!” I said.
She dropped it.
Hundreds of goblins had been pushing against a wall that stopped existing, and the front forty of them came through into the gap like water out of a broken dam, and I met them there.
Kade taught me that a man in a doorway is worth six in a field, and that the doorway does the work if you let it. The hole in Marchgate’s wall was forty feet wide, but the rubble made it narrow, and the narrow part was two men across, and I stood in the narrow part.
The first one came at me high and I took his arm off at the shoulder and most of what was under it. The second tripped over him. The third had a spear and I went inside it and opened him from hip to collarbone and the pact went through him and into the two behind him, and all three came apart in the same motion, and the thing I remember is that it wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t difficult at all.
Kill a man with a sword and you feel it stop somewhere. Bone, mail, the drag of meat. Duskfang with the dark on it didn’t stop. It went through them the way your hand goes through smoke, and the only reason my arm knew it’d done anything was the weight coming off my elbow at the end.
I killed a great many goblins in the mouth of that hole. I’ve never counted and I’m not going to start.
Isolde never touched one of them.
That’s the part I couldn’t make Aldara understand afterward, and I’ve stopped trying. She stood on the fallen block at my left where the rubble was low, with her hands open at her sides and her hair lifting off her shoulders in air that had nothing moving in it, and the goblins that came up that side died before they got within a spear’s length of her. There was no gesture. There were no words. She had dropped the wind wall because holding a thing that big cost her more than killing them one at a time did, and killing them one at a time cost her almost nothing at all.
A goblin came on running and then it was down, chest opened outward from the inside, the smell of a coming storm rolling off it, and she’d already be looking past it at the next one. Twice I saw it fork. One bolt going out of her and splitting in the air like a root, two of them coming apart at the same instant twenty feet from each other, and the light of it printing the whole breach white for as long as it takes to blink.
And twice, when I overextended, the air behind my heel went hard and gave me something to push off that hadn’t been there before. She never looked at me when she did it. Neither of us said a word about any of it. There was no time and there was no need.
I’d come up onto that rubble thinking I was the frightening thing in the hole. I want to be honest about how long that lasted.
Jak was on the fallen arch block above us, and he was the reason we lived through the first minute. Anything with a bow that came into the hole got a bolt in it before it could draw, and he never once shot at anything I was already dealing with.
Behind us the line formed. Tamsin brought her company into the gap on our right and locked shields across the low side, and after that the hole had three parts: Tamsin’s shields, my two feet of rubble, and Isolde. Aldara stood back where she could see all of it and moved men into it as it wore down, and it wore down constantly.
Elowen came into the breach four times that I saw. Four times, into a forty-foot hole full of goblins, to drag men out by the harness. The last time she came back with Dain Carver over her shoulder, a man half again her size, and she got him behind the shields and went back for the next one before anybody could tell her not to.
They kept coming. They came for a long time.
At some point my shoulder stopped hurting, which frightened me more than the pain had. At some point I was standing on them instead of the rubble. At some point Isolde put her hand flat between my shoulder blades to shove me back into line and left it there half a second longer than the shove required, and I didn’t have room in my head for that and kept it anyway.
I know the moment it broke, because the pressure went off my chest.
One breath there were four of them coming at me over the pile and the ones behind were pushing, and the next breath the pushing stopped, and the four in front discovered they were four goblins alone in a doorway with me, and it went out of their faces.
Out beyond the rubble a horn sounded. Three notes, descending, unhurried.
“That’s the withdrawal,” Jak said from the block above me. “Same call as the road.”
They went the way they’d come and they went in order, and I didn’t have room in me to be insulted by it yet. They picked up what they could carry of their wounded. The ranks out in the field opened to take them back, and the whole eastern host began to fold away through the mist in blocks, on the notes, while three hundred people stood in a broken wall and watched them do it.
Then somebody screamed.
It wasn’t a word. He was up on the northern span and I never found out who he was, and whatever came out of him the man beside him took up, and it went down four hundred feet of that wall like fire through thatch and came off the end of it into the courtyard and doubled.
Three hundred people who had spent the morning certain they were going to die that day found out they weren’t.
Men beat their shields with whatever was still in their hands. Somebody started hammering a spear butt against stone and half the yard picked up the rhythm without deciding to. The fletcher’s apprentice, who was fourteen and had walked that line all morning with his arms full of other people’s arrows, sat down in the middle of the courtyard and howled. Militiamen who’d been strangers at dawn had hold of each other by the shoulders. Down the market street a bell went, and it wasn’t the alarm, and nobody had told anybody to ring it.
I stood in the hole with my arms shaking and a dead goblin across my boots and no idea at all what to do with my face.
She got to me first.
She came down off the fallen block with her black hair half out of its tie and blood on her leathers that wasn’t hers and her hands still white at the knuckles, and she took two fistfuls of my shirt and pulled, and I went.
Her mouth was hot and tasted of ash and she kissed the way she’d fought, all forward pressure and no ground given, and my hand went into her hair and hers closed on my arm hard enough to bruise. The charge was still coming off her rings, small and bright and stinging against my skin, and I didn’t care. Neither of us was gentle about it. Neither of us was trying to be.
The wall saw. The wall went up half a note.
I didn’t notice that at the time and I’ve had it described to me since by approximately everybody in Marchgate.
She let go and stepped back one pace and looked at me with her chin up, breathing hard, absolutely unembarrassed.
“That was not a promise,” she said.
“I didn’t hear one.”
“Good.”
“Don’t follow them!” Aldara said, from somewhere behind us, to nobody in particular and to everybody. “Nobody goes out. Nobody chases. Stand where you are until I have a count.”
The word count went through that courtyard the way cold water goes through a shirt.
The cheering didn’t stop all at once. It came apart in pieces, quarter by quarter, as people stopped looking east at the mist and started looking around themselves at the ground they were standing on, and at who was standing on it with them, and at who wasn’t.
By the time it had finished coming apart, the low continuous calling of names had already started, from every quarter at once, and it went on for the rest of the day.
My arms shook, which they do afterward and never during. Duskfang was still in my right hand with the dark going out of it slowly, the way a coal goes out. The bodies lay over the rubble in a shape roughly like a fan, thickest in the two feet where I’d been standing, and I looked at that shape for a while without any feeling about it I could name.
Astarra said nothing. She’d said one thing all morning.
Somewhere past the rubble a goblin was still alive and crying out, and after a while somebody went and made it stop, and the somebody was Tamsin, and she came back wiping her blade and didn’t say anything about that either.
The woman sat down.
Not gracefully. She got as far as the fallen arch block and her legs stopped taking instructions, and she went down on the stone with her back against it and her hands open on her knees, palms up, shaking hard.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” Her voice had gone rough. “Spent. It isn’t the same and it looks worse.”
I sat down next to her, because my legs had come to the same decision about ten seconds later than hers.
We stayed there a while with the calling of names going on in the streets behind us.
“Isolde Ashenmere,” she said.
I turned my head. She was looking straight ahead at the mist where the host had gone.
“You fought beside me for an hour and a half,” she said, “and you have not once asked me my name, and I have just kissed you in front of an entire town. I’m giving it to you before somebody else does and gets it wrong.”
“Edrin Hale.”
“I know. Half this wall has been shouting it.” She let her head go back against the stone. “Storm-caller, if you hear it in the street. Ashenmere is a name in Valecourt, and I’m not going to explain what it costs me to use it, and that’s the whole of the introduction.”
“It’s a good introduction. Efficient.”
“I’ve had a long morning.”
Somebody went past us at a run with a folded stretcher. Neither of us moved.
“You dropped a wall on my word,” she said. “A stranger’s word. You had no reason to believe I could put it back up.”
“You’d held it for thirty of them already. That was the reason.”
“That’s a very fast piece of arithmetic to do with a broken dam coming through a hole at you.”
“I’m quick at some things and remarkably slow at others. My mother could give you a list.”
The corner of her mouth moved. In the whole of that day it was the first thing anybody did that wasn’t about the dead or the wall, and it went through me harder than it had any right to.
“That wasn’t the sword,” she said eventually.
Everything in me went very still.
“I watched the dark come up your arm before it ever reached the steel,” she said, still not looking at me. “Every man on that wall is going to spend the rest of his life telling people about the black blade of Marchgate, and every one of them is going to be wrong, and if I were you I’d let them be wrong for as long as they’ll keep doing it.”
“You’re not asking me anything.”
“I’m telling you that I watched, and that I know what I watched, and that we’re going to talk about it when I can stand.” She turned her head against the stone to look at me. Violet, bloodshot, absolutely level. “I’ve seen four people in my life use power that wasn’t theirs. Two of them are dead and one of them should be.”
“And the fourth?”
“Sitting in a hole in a wall with somebody else’s power still going out of his arm, being charming about it.”
“I’m barely being charming. I’m at about a third.”
“Solara defend this town at your full effort.” She closed her eyes. “Not today, Edrin Hale. Tomorrow I’m going to want to know whose power that was, and today I’m going to sleep for eleven hours. Go and be useful and stop sitting next to me like we’re at a picnic.”
The count took until afternoon, and Aldara did it herself, walking, with a boy carrying the slate.
I helped carry. That’s the whole of my afternoon and I’m not going to make it into anything else. We brought them out of the breach and off the wall walk and out from under the fallen gatehouse floor, and we laid them in rows in the market square because it was the only flat clean ground left, and the woman with the child’s scarf in her hair went along the rows with a bucket and a cloth and washed their faces before anybody was allowed to look at them.
Marchgate lost eighty-one people that morning. Sixty-three of them were on the wall span when the gate went.
Dain Carver lived. Elowen took a splinter of the arch out of his back the length of my hand and he lived, and when I went past the chapel he was face down on a table with his fist closed around the table leg, swearing steadily at a woman who was ignoring him with total professional calm.
At some point in the afternoon I went behind the barracks to the horse trough and put my arms in it to the elbow and stood there a long while trying to get somebody else out from under my fingernails. The water went the colour of weak tea. I did it twice more before dark and it never entirely worked.
The eastern orchard post never answered.
They found the relay wire cut clean at the ditch and the post itself burned off at the base, and Aldara stood over it for a long time with her hands behind her back. It’d gone at first light, before the horns, before anybody on the wall had seen a goblin. Whoever cut it’d walked up to it in the dark and done it quietly and gone away.
“They took the eye first,” she said. “Then they came.”
She had the officers in the yard by the ruined arch when the light started to go, and she didn’t make a speech. She stood in front of a forty-foot hole with the sky coming through it and gave them the numbers.
“Eighty-one dead. A hundred and ten who will not stand a watch this month. The Ashward Gate is gone. Not damaged. Gone, along with sixteen feet of the arch and the gatehouse floor, and the Crown mason nearest to us is eleven days away on the White Road if he is at home when the rider gets there.”
Nobody said anything.
“The eastern line is fourteen fit hands. Six can hold what is left of the wall. Five can cover the approaches. Three know the bell line well enough to mend it.” She let that sit. “Those numbers are the whole of what stands between this town and the next one of those.”
“There’ll be a next one,” Tamsin said.
“There will. They lost perhaps four hundred and they went home in step, which means four hundred was a price somebody had already agreed to pay.” Aldara looked at the hole in her wall. “And we did not beat that. We survived it, in a doorway, because two people happened to be standing in the right place with more in them than anybody had any right to expect.”
She didn’t look at me when she said it, which I appreciated more than I could’ve said.
“So we need something we do not have,” she went on. “Not timber. Not another fourteen exhausted people. If the answer to that gate is a mason and a season, we do not have a season, and I am not going to stand here in the spring and tell you we are going to try harder.”
A woman from the quartermaster’s office said, quietly, “Ironfast.”
The word went around the yard and changed the temperature of it.
“Ironfast is a story,” somebody said.
“Ironfast is a Thren-Khaz work sitting four days northwest of this wall with a door nobody has opened in six hundred years,” Aldara said, “and this morning an old woman took our gate apart with a stick. I have stopped being impressed by what is supposed to be impossible.” She turned. “Dorva Ironhand is to be at my house at first light. Anything that came off that post, anything the repair crews turn up in the rubble of the arch, it goes to her before it goes to me.”
That was all. The officers went to their work.
I stayed in the yard a while after, looking at the hole where the gate had been, with the evening coming through it onto the stones, and the rows in the market square behind me, and every part of me hurting at once.