The Refuge Song (17 page)

“Because they don't allow us to marry, they think we don't weep when our wives or husbands are beaten, or killed. Because we can't bear children, they think we don't mourn when they take the children we have raised. Because they see no value in our lives, they don't believe that we will fight for those lives, and for one another. Tonight we show them that our lives are our own, and that we are more human than they can ever know. Tonight we say
enough.
Tonight we say
no more.
”

I felt the ground shake, as hundreds of staffs and axes beat the earth in time with Piper's final words.
No more.

chapter 19

We carried no torches—the darkness was our ally. Piper gave the signal, his sword raised high and then sweeping down. He stood so close to me that I could hear the blade slice the air. The advance began, as quietly as five hundred armed troops could manage, to the northernmost edge of the charred forest. At another signal from Piper, the advance troops slipped from the woods. Surprise was our only advantage, so we held off on the main charge as long as possible. For now, it was just six pairs of assassins, hand-selected by Simon and Piper, loping up the plain toward the town with knives destined for the throats of the patrols circling the city.

The night quickly swallowed the assassins as they moved over the plain in a crouching run. We'd watched the town for long enough to know that there would be three patrols orbiting the walls at any time, but we also knew that the patrols were complacent. The sentries in the four gate towers looked mainly inward, at the captive town itself. If they were expecting any trouble, it wasn't from outside.

One of the patrols was within our sight, a torch tracing their journey around the town's southern edge. There would be at least three riders, their leader carrying the torch. When a shout came from further west, the torch swung around—but the noise cut off, stopping so swiftly that I wondered if it had, after all, been just a crow's hacking call. There was a moment's stillness, before the torch resumed its route around the wall. Then came another sound, a shorter yell this time, and two clashes of steel. The torch dropped, bounced once, and was extinguished in the snow. I could hear, away to the east, the distant noise of a horse bolting. Silence returned—but this wasn't ordinary silence. Knowing what was happening on the plain, the silence felt stifling, a blanket thrown over the night.

The next signal came from the assassins: a flash of light at the base of the wall, halfway between the northern and western gates. They had carried oil and matches, to get the fire started quickly. Ideally it would weaken the wall; at least it would be a diversion while we charged from the south.

Once more, Piper's sword was raised, and then lowered. We began to run. There was the noise of five hundred people's footsteps, stumbling on the uneven ground. Panting breaths, in lungs tightened by waiting in the cold, and by fear. Scabbards knocking against legs; knives jangling.

The Council's soldiers hadn't been forewarned. My journey to meet the Ringmaster hadn't won his help, but at least he hadn't betrayed us. There was no ambush, no phalanx of soldiers pouring from the gates to meet us. The first cries of warning came when we were halfway across the open plain between the forest and the town. Shouts and cries spread from gate to gate, and there was a scrambling of lights within the walls as the warning was sounded.

The arrows came first, when we were a few hundred yards from
the walls. One landed just to my left, plowing a ditch two feet long in the ground. I kept my shield over my head, but there weren't enough shields for everyone, and not all our troops had two arms to carry them. Beside me Piper carried only his sword, and so did Zoe, to keep her left arm free for her throwing knives. In the near total darkness, there was no kidding ourselves that we might dodge the arrows—they sprang from the dark above us, as if the night sky itself were suddenly sharpened. The archers made it clear, right away, that the Council soldiers weren't holding back as they had on the island. If they knew Zach's twin was part of the attack, it wasn't stopping them. I wondered if the General ordered that no concessions to Zach's safety should be made, and if this was a sign of his waning power. But all speculation was ended by the scream that went up behind me, the sound of an arrow finding its mark. I turned, but the fallen man had been overtaken by our oncoming troops, his scream already half drowned in blood, a gurgle of sodden lungs.

The southern gates opened, spilling light as well as the Council soldiers in their red tunics. The mounted soldiers came first, four abreast. They carried torches, as well as weapons, so that the flames flashed off the blades, and off the eyes of the horses.

Back in Simon's tent at the encampment, when we'd planned the attack, it had seemed straightforward: arrows and crosses marked on a map. The best vantage point for our archers to plant themselves, to provide cover for the runners with grappling irons and ladders for the wall. The routes where our two mounted squadrons would flank the town and lay siege to the northern wall where the assassins had begun the fire. Four squadrons to charge at the eastern gate, where the sentry tower was flimsiest. On Simon's map, everything had been neat and contained. As soon as the battle began, that neatness was lost in blows and blood. On the island, I had watched most of the
battle from the window of a locked room in the fort; I thought I'd witnessed what fighting was. I realized, now, how wrong I had been, and what difference a few hundred yards could make. In the midst of the battle, now, I had no sense of strategy, or of the overall shape of the battle. I could see only what was happening immediately in front of me. My instructions were to stay close to Zoe and Piper as they led the attack on the eastern gate, but I quickly lost any sense of our destination. Everything was too fast, the whole world accelerating. The horses' hoofs set the ground beneath us trembling. A mounted soldier thrust a blade downwards at Zoe, and she dived to the side. I ducked to avoid a sword that swung by my head as Piper exchanged blows with another soldier to my right. Zoe had regained her feet when I next looked, and when the rider blocked her strike, she slipped under his sword and severed the girth. Her blade nicked the horse's belly too, and blood dropped to the snow as the saddle slid down the far side, taking the soldier with it, so that he fell almost on top of me. He scrambled up, but had dropped his sword in the fall. When he bent to retrieve it, I stamped my foot on the hilt, pressing it into the snow.

The fallen soldier looked up from where he crouched. Now I should kill him. I knew that, and my hands tightened on my sword hilt. But before I could raise my blade, Zoe had dodged around the flailing horse and sunk her blade into the man's stomach. She had to shove the sword again to dislodge him. His blood left her blade blackened as he slid backward off it to the ground.

Next to me, Piper had fought free of his opponent, but another horse came straight at him. He stepped aside at the last moment, aiming a low slash at the horse's legs. It was a terrible sight—one of the legs seemed to have gained an extra joint, a bend where none should be. The
horse went down screaming, and the soldier jumped clear just in time to avoid being crushed as his mount rolled to its side, knocking me down as it went.

Piper and Zoe were fighting above me, each hand to hand with a Council soldier. Beside me, on the ground, the horse tried to right itself on its broken legs. Its nostrils flared, wide as overripe lilies. Its eyes had rolled so far back that all I could see was the white, marbled with red veins. When the horse screamed, the noise was somehow more human than half the sounds of the battle around me. One of its legs was pierced by its own bone, a spar of white thrust through the blood-matted hair.

I pulled my knife from my belt, reached up to the horse's thrashing head, and slit its throat. The blood emptied itself onto my hand, surprising me with its heat. Its force, too. It didn't run but spurted, spraying up my arm. The snow beneath it melted, the blood soaking into the iced earth. Then it was finished.

The horse died a single death. I felt it, the simplicity of it—no answering echo of death from a twin. For something so blood-soaked, it felt clean. I scrambled to my feet.

The first wave of Council riders had broken through the front lines of our advance, but to the west I caught sight of ladders against the walls, and figures were scrambling up them. I had no time to see whether the climbers reached the top; the Council's foot soldiers, carrying shields as well as swords, were swarming into the gaps created by their riders in our front line. I'd lost my shield, and I didn't even remember where, or how. I stuck close to Piper and Zoe, staying out of the way when I could, and swinging my sword in wide slashes whenever a soldier drew too near. Any time a soldier bore down on me hard, Piper or Zoe stepped in to fight them off.

The few times my sword hit flesh, I had to quash nausea. But that didn't stop me. I didn't deal any killing blows, but only through inexperience rather than reluctance. Nonetheless I made several strikes, and my blade was beaded with blood before long. I'd been the cause of so many deaths already that it didn't feel strange to see the blood on my own weapon, finally, tangible proof of what I'd already done so many times.

All our effort seemed to make little difference. The three of us had gained some ground, but from what glances I was able to snatch it was clear that our troops were being overrun. The Council's soldiers were still pouring from the southern gate, and our troops with ladders had been surrounded, trapped against the wall. Farther west, where our first wave of troops had tried to set fires along the wall, the damp had repelled them, and only two of the fires remained lit. Scanning the wall, I could see no breaks yet in the structure, and the gates themselves remained tightly defended.

As we gained a little ground we could see better, the torches and fires along the wall throwing flashes of light. But the closer we were to the walls, the more deadly were the arrows. When we were in close combat with the Council's soldiers, the archers held back, but as soon as we had a moment's respite, the arrows found us again. They didn't fall from above—falling is too airy a word. They stabbed down, forceful as a horse's kick. Forceful enough to bury themselves inches deep in the earth. Twice arrows passed so close that I felt the chill air warmed by their passing. A third arrow struck Piper in the leg, but my warning cry came in time for him to leap aside, so that the arrow's head glanced along his flesh rather than tearing through it. Time had become blurred, and when I wiped my face my hand came away dark and wet, but I couldn't tell whether it was my own
blood or someone else's. Several times, I staggered over bodies on the ground, lying in postures that announced themselves as lifeless. A head thrown back at an angle that no intact neck would allow; a knee that bent forward instead of backward. There was no light from the moon to cast shadows, only the glow of the distant fires at the wall. But the fallen bodies made their own shadows, bloodstains black in the snow.

Piper retrieved his knife from the neck of a dead soldier a few yards away. There was a boulder, dusted with snow, and we crouched in its shelter for a moment.

“There should be more Council soldiers,” said Piper, looking around. “By our tally they should have upward of fifteen hundred in there. Where are they?”

“I think we have enough to be going on with,” said Zoe. She wiped each side of her sword on the snow, leaving two smears of blood.

We hunched as we ran, flinching from the sounds of arrows overhead, to rejoin Simon, who was sheltering in a shallow ditch barely fifty yards from the southern gate. Ten or more of our troops were there with him. One man swore as he spat two broken teeth out into the snow. A woman with a gash on her calf was binding it tightly with a strip of cloth, her teeth clenched over her bottom lip as if she could bite back the pain.

Simon spoke quickly.

“Violet's squadron have got the ladders up twice and been repelled both times. I've drawn Charlie's men back from the western side—that's too heavily fortified, and the fires aren't taking. They're going to join Violet for another push at the south, where the watchtowers are farthest apart, and the fire's damaged the wall.”

“And Derek?” Piper said.

Simon wiped a hand down his face, and gave his head a quick shake.
“Killed at the wall, with all his men—though they managed to get some fires started first.” Simon's sword hand was bruised and swollen, the skin purple and stretched too tightly on the fattened flesh.

“Derek's squadron didn't light that,” said Piper, pointing up at the town. From its center, high above the walls, a plume of smoke was unfurling into the sky.

“Something's going on inside,” said Simon. Despite the streak of blood on his cheek, and his bruised hand, he looked more animated than I'd seen him since the island. “The harvesters must have got the message. They're joining in.”

“It explains why the Council haven't unleashed their full numbers out here,” Zoe said. “But the Omegas in there can only do so much. They won't even have proper weapons.”

She was right. I pictured New Hobart's residents, armed with pokers or cooking knives, pitted against the broadswords of trained soldiers.

“We need to get in there before they're all killed,” I said. My voice came out higher than I'd intended.

“What do you think we're trying to do?” said Zoe.

Piper looked behind him, surveying the plain between the town and the burned forest. Most of our troops had hunkered down now in whatever sparse shelter they could find. Some were huddled behind the bodies of horses or soldiers, peering up at the walled city above us. The Council soldiers, too, had regrouped, drawing back to the gates, though some fighting was still visible near the western gate.

“We need to make a push on the southern gate, while their soldiers are distracted by what's going on inside the walls. Bring the archers forward to those boulders to cover us.” Piper gestured at a cluster of low boulders on the plain, a little to our west. “Pull back the troops from the eastern wall, too—we'll need them all.”

This was it, then. The final push. Within the walls, the people of
New Hobart would be fighting, and dying. On the plain below us were the broken bodies of our troops, and of the Council soldiers. Their twins, wherever they were, would never wake today. The carrion birds were coming with the dawn.

Under Simon's and Piper's directions, our surviving troops began to mass on a small hillock just south of the wall. Some arrows still reached us there, but I'd found that if I concentrated, I could usually sense their approach before we heard the sound, giving us a few extra seconds to scurry aside. Even those troops who had glared at me in the camp obeyed me now when I shouted my warnings.