The Refuge Song (18 page)

It took half an hour for our troops to muster for the final assault. A small force of soldiers rode out of the town and tried to cut off one of our squadrons before it could join the main group, but the icy ground was treacherous for the horses and there were four axmen in the squadron who managed to hold them off long enough for the group to reach the shelter of the hill.

“How many of us are left?” I said to Piper.

He scanned the gathered troops. “More than half.”

Neither of us had to say it.
Not enough
. But we'd fought better than I would have dared to imagine. Already we'd lasted longer than my worst fears had predicted. Perhaps Piper had been right: our troops had needed to believe that winning was possible. It had made a difference. The axmen who I'd just watched, holding ten mounted soldiers at bay, had been different from the downcast troops at the encampment the day before. And those within the town had not only received our message, but they'd answered it and fought with us. It might not be enough to save any of us. But Piper had been right—there was some hope in this day, even among the blood.

We formed into rough lines, and again Piper, Zoe, and I were at the front. When Piper gave the shout to charge, we left the cover of the hill
ock and ran. Time, which had been running so speedily, now seemed very slow. I had time to hear everything: my own noisy breath. The knives tucked in Piper's belt striking one another as he ran beside me. The sound of the soft new snow giving way underfoot, and the crunch of the icy layer beneath.

I called out a warning when I felt the arrows coming, but here we had no shelter, and running as a pack meant there was no room to dodge. A woman to my left went down with an arrow to the face. The sound of the impact wasn't fleshy—it was a bone crunch, like an ax into wood. There were shouts from behind me, too, as others were struck.

The arrows only relented when the first Council soldiers reached us, a hundred yards from the wall. After the spread-out clashes on the plain, here the fighting was cramped. Twice I had to duck to avoid the swords of our own troops. Piper and Zoe were fighting back-to-back. Between them, there were no spare movements, and nothing casual or accidental. Each sword thrust or elbow jab was precise and intentional. Everything that they touched bled.

“Stay close,” Piper grunted, glancing at me from the corner of his eye while he exchanged blows with a tall soldier.

I stayed as near to Piper and Zoe as I could, striking only when I had a clear chance and wouldn't get in their way. But after several minutes, one of the Council soldiers had gained on Zoe, pushing her back so that she stumbled into Piper. She landed on her back, and managed to keep her sword in hand, but the soldier made the most of the fall and kicked out, hard, at her jaw. Her head was thrown back with the force of it, her neck exposed. When the soldier drew back his sword, I swung at the back of his head.

I'd traveled too long with hunters to be squeamish. I'd plucked pigeons and skinned rabbits and picked through the carcasses for anything edible, kidneys and liver and all. In the attack on the island I'd
seen people killed, and smelled the rich iron whiff of blood. But this was different. I felt the resistance of the skin, and its giving way, and finally the jar of the blade lodging in bone.

I heard three screams: the dying man's. His twin's, in my mind. And my own, lasting longer than either of the others.

chapter 20

I pulled back my blade. The man fell as if my sword had been a hook on which his body hung.

Something broke in me. All the visions I'd had over the past few months were knocked loose, to rattle at random through my mind. The blast. Rows of tanks, now full of fire. The island's crater, full of blood. The blast.

Piper grabbed me, shook me until I had to stop the scream to draw breath.

“Concentrate on staying alive,” he said, then shoved me to the side as another soldier came at him. I staggered back, sword shaking as I held it out before me.

I had already been responsible for more deaths than I knew. But this was new. The swing of my arms and the steel of my sword had put an end to that man. It was final, and absolute, and as intimate as a kiss.
It could never be undone. His twin, wherever she was, some Omega somewhere, had died, too, without even knowing why.

“Pull yourself together,” Zoe shouted at me. I looked up. She was standing again, blood running from her mouth where the soldier had kicked her. Her shirt was sprayed with blood. At the collar it had stiffened, standing out from her neck at a strange angle. Even her teeth, as she shouted at me, had flecks of blood on them. Could she taste it? I wondered. What had happened to us? I used to work in the fields and grow things. Now, on this icy plain, I was a harvester of blood.

“Pull yourself together,” she shouted. I breathed out, and in again. Somehow my sword was still in my hands.

I looked up. We were making no progress. The front line of our final charge had already broken, the soldiers driving us farther from the wall. Simon and a cluster of his troops had gained a little ground, but not enough. They were cut off now, and surrounded by Council soldiers. They reminded me of the islands of the Sunken Shore, being gradually swallowed by the hungry tide. Simon fought with two swords, and a knife in his third hand. Nobody got past him. But two of the Omegas next to him had already fallen, and the soldiers were closing ever tighter around him.

Perhaps I felt the riders coming—perhaps that's what led me to turn east, to the road, just as Piper gave the shout to push forward once again. I almost fell as 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 ripping wood, the gate was breached, grappling irons hauling the spars from the frame. The Ringmaster's army had the numbers to keep the Council troops at bay while they prized the gate apart. Already, the new
attackers were streaming into the town. There was no way that New Hobart could withstand this onslaught.

The soldiers facing us had realized they were about to be trapped between the Ringmaster's forces and ours. A squadron of his soldiers had already veered away from the fallen gate and were galloping in formation along the wall toward us. They wore the same red uniform as the Council's soldiers, but didn't hesitate to ride them down. There were cries for the Council soldiers on the plain to retreat and regroup. But there was nowhere for them to retreat to. The eastern gate was down, and our forces, though depleted, were still pushing in from the south and west. More of the Ringmaster's troops were pouring onto the plain from the east. Now that they were closer, I could see that they each wore a strip of black cloth bound around the forehead, to distinguish them from the soldiers they were facing. Everywhere I looked, the black-banded soldiers outnumbered the others.

Once they'd taken the eastern gate, the town fell quickly. More smoke rose from within the walls. The southern gate, closest to us, was forced open from within, and it was the Ringmaster's troops who stormed their way through the fighting at the base of the watchtower and rushed out of the gate. I heard shouts from within the walls, and imagined the confusion of the townsfolk, faced with these new arrivals who still wore the Council's red tunics but who were fighting alongside them to free the town.

Something pale swung from the eastern watchtower. At first I thought it might be another body, slumped over the railing. But the wind gusted and the pale object lifted, flapped twice, and then unfurled. I could see the silhouette of a hunchbacked woman, raising the flag to the wind. It was the Omega insignia, painted on a sheet.

The Council had branded it on our foreheads. Now, it hung from the tower, above the smoke and blood. The town had fallen.

Out on the plain, the remaining Council soldiers were fighting with the frenzied energy of those who knew they could not win. Next to me, Zoe struggled hand to hand with a bearded man. Beside her was Piper, holding off a soldier who was already bleeding from a slash to the head. Piper dodged beneath the blow of a second soldier, a woman bearing an ax. When she saw me standing behind him, she came straight at me, ax raised. She looked as scared as I was, her eyes open too wide, white showing all around the pupils, like those of the horse I had killed. Had that been only hours before? Time had slowed until it was something I waded through, like the bloodied snow.

I raised my sword and braced myself. I blocked the first swing. When she came at me again, the impact knocked the sword from my hands. She raised the ax once more. Everything in the frost-tipped morning suddenly seemed very bright.
Zach
, I thought.
What have I done to you? What have you done to us?

chapter 21

My first thought on waking was that I must be back in the deadlands—my vision had the same cloudiness as in those weeks of watering eyes and ash-laden winds. Then I saw that I was indoors, and there was no ash, only a blurriness that pulsed slightly, the room around me sharpening, then slipping back into haze, keeping time with the throbbing lump at the back of my head.

It took a while for me to distinguish between the different pains in my body. The surface pain of the grazes and scrapes on my knuckles and knees. The tightness at the side of my head, the swollen skin amplifying my pulse so that each beat became a wince. And the one pain around which the others orbited: my right forearm.

“She's awake.” Zoe's voice.

Piper walked toward me. He was limping heavily.

“You hurt your leg?”

“No.” He gestured at Zoe. She was still sitting, and as my vision
began to clear I could make out a bandage around her right thigh. Blood had seeped through it, carving a red smile in the white cloth.

“It's a clean cut, and it's been stitched. It'll heal quickly,” she said.

“What about your head?” Piper asked me.

I lifted my good arm to touch the lump, which felt hard and hot. My hand came away clean of blood. But when I tried to lift my other arm, there was a pain that didn't limit itself to the wrist but darted through my body, and brought me to the brink of vomiting. The wrist had swollen, thickening to twice its normal width. I tried to move my fingers, but they ignored me.

“What happened?”

“It's broken,” Piper said.

“Not that. What happened at the end of the battle?”

“We're in New Hobart,” he said.

“Us and the Ringmaster,” said Zoe pointedly.

“We can talk about that later,” Piper said. “We need to reset the bone, straighten it before the swelling gets worse, and get it in a splint.”

“You can't do it yourselves,” I said.

“You see any doctors around here?” Zoe waved her arm at the room around us. It was small and half in darkness. The shutter on the window had been smashed, the broken spars casting uneven lines of shadow across the floor. The door to the next room was burned away, nothing remaining but a strip of wood next to the hinges. Through the door I could see a pile of broken chairs, stacked haphazardly. I was on a bare mattress. Another mattress lay against the opposite wall, beside a jug of water.

Zoe took the edge of the sheet from the other mattress and began to rip it into strips. The noise reminded me of the tearing of arrows through the air. I tried to sit up, and the pain flooded my arm again.

Somewhere in Wyndham, or wherever he was, Zach was feeling the
same pain. Once, when we were eight or nine, he'd cut his foot open on some broken glass in the river. I'd been sitting alone on the doorstep peeling parsnips when the pain came. I'd looked down at my foot. There was nothing to see: no blood, no wound, nothing at all to explain the slicing pain that had made me cry out and drop the vegetables to the ground. For a moment I'd thought I must have been bitten by a spider or a fire ant. But as I examined my intact foot, crying, I realized it must be Zach. Soon he came limping up to the house, leaving red footsteps in the dirt. His foot was opened from instep to heel, a cut so deep that it had to be stitched. I limped for days, he for weeks.

Now, as Piper whittled a chair leg into a splint, and Zoe prepared the bandages, it was comforting to know that Zach would be feeling my pain, too. Was it that I wanted him to suffer? Or because he would share my pain, understand it? Both, perhaps.

I couldn't help but cry out when Zoe braced her foot against the table and pulled my arm straight. Piper was holding me still, and I turned my head into his neck so I didn't have to watch what Zoe was doing. When she began, Piper's grip tightened against me as I tried to shy away from my own arm. There was a grinding of bones.

Then it was over. Not the pain, which continued, but the dragging of bone on bone. My body slackened onto Piper's chest. I could feel my sweat, greasing both our skin.

Zoe was busy, strapping the wooden splint tightly to my arm.

“You'll need to keep it still, and raised if you can,” Piper said. “When Zoe broke her wrist as a kid, she made it worse by refusing to rest properly after Sally set it for her.”

“Did it keep hurting for long, after it was set?”

I'd asked Zoe, but they both answered. “Yes.”

“Done,” said Zoe, tying the bandage tightly.

Piper lowered me so that I was lying down again. He placed a folded
blanket under my arm, to prop it higher. He moved me as carefully as a person carrying a butterfly in cupped hands. I thought of how his knife had been trained on me when our defeat had seemed certain. I said nothing of it to him. We both knew there was no less tenderness in that poised knife blade than there was in this holding.

“You should rest,” he said.

“Tell me what happened.”

“You saw almost all of it,” Zoe said. “The Ringmaster and his soldiers tore through the eastern gate in no time. There was some confusion, inside, from the Omegas of the town, but they worked it out soon enough. The Council soldiers fighting us were outnumbered.”

“What happened to them?”

“They refused to surrender,” Piper said. “Most of them were killed.”

I didn't realize that I'd winced, until Zoe rolled her eyes. “Don't act precious about it,” said Zoe. “You were out there yourself, swinging a sword around. You knew what it meant, when we decided to free the town.”

As if I could forget. I could still feel the sensation of killing that man. The feeling of blade wedged into bone. The double scream of him and his twin, in different octaves of terror.

Piper went on. “Some fled north. We didn't pursue them. A few gave themselves up, at the end. We still haven't decided what to do with them.”

“You say that as though it's up to us,” Zoe said. “The Ringmaster's soldiers are guarding them. You really think he's going to ask for our opinion?”

“We did it, though,” I said. “We freed New Hobart.”

“It's under the rule of a different Councilor, at least,” said Zoe.

I closed my eyes again. Or, rather, they closed themselves. Unconsciousness was claiming me again.

“Find Elsa,” I tried to say, but my lips wouldn't obey me, and I slipped into silence.

Ω

I was thirsty, and stuck amid dreams of flame. Somewhere nearby, I heard the Ringmaster's voice.

“But she's going to live?” he said.

“If you let her rest,” Zoe snapped. Somebody wiped my face with a cloth, and I turned to press my skin against its coolness.

“Why's she so pale?” the Ringmaster asked.

The flames rose again, and I heard nothing more.

When I woke there was no sign of him, or Piper. Only Zoe, asleep on the floor by my mattress. I didn't know how long I'd been asleep for, but the blood that had been scarlet on her bandaged leg was now dried and black.

She woke when Piper came in. When he'd strapped my broken arm into a sling, made of torn sheets, I managed to eat a little of the bread that he'd brought with him. Standing was difficult, and my whole body moved awkwardly around the pivot of pain that was my bound arm. I had to lean on Piper's shoulder as I followed him and Zoe into the next room. Beyond the stack of smashed chairs, the room opened up into a large hall. A circle of intact chairs was laid out in the center, where the Ringmaster was waiting, with Sally, Xander, Simon, and an older woman. I'd not met her before, but I recognized her short hair and the hump on her back. It was she who'd unfurled the makeshift flag from the eastern tower, toward the end of the battle.

“This is June,” said Piper. “She led the uprising inside the town.”

She glanced at my arm, the splint protruding from the bandage at my elbow. “I won't shake your hand, then,” she said.

“And of course you remember the Ringmaster,” said Zoe. Her words were sharpened.

“You'd all be dead, or tanked, by now, if she hadn't gone to him,” Sally said.

“You lied to us,” Zoe said.

“If I'd told you I was meeting him that night, you wouldn't have let me go. We wouldn't have been able to free the town.”

“Is it free?” said Zoe. “I still see Council soldiers patrolling the gates.”

“I've told you,” said the Ringmaster. “They work for me, not the Council. And if it weren't for them, the Council could retake this city anytime they wanted.”

He sat apart from the others. There was a cut on his cheek, already healing. Simon, opposite me, had his left arm in a sling, and a bruise at the corner of his mouth.

“What is this place?” I asked, looking around. It was big—too big to be a house. This room alone was bigger than the children's dormitory in Elsa's holding house.

“It's the tithe collector's office,” the Ringmaster said.

“It doesn't help with the morale in the town,” June said. “You setting yourselves up here, where the Council used to make us queue to deliver our tithes. That and taking down the flag.”

“This place was empty,” the Ringmaster said. “What would they prefer? That we turn someone out of their home and base ourselves there? As for the flag, you can't expect my troops to be happy about working night and day under an Omega flag, when it was them who freed the town.”

“We freed it together,” I said. “If we hadn't attacked, you and your soldiers would have done nothing to free New Hobart.” I turned to June. “When we left the warnings for you, we never hoped that you'd manage to do so much. How did you do it? Had you hidden weapons?”

“A few, but not enough,” she said. “They were thorough, in the weeks after they sealed the city. There were searches and raids, and rewards if people turned each other in for concealing contraband. They had us pretty well disarmed. Not to mention afraid.

“It was the pumpkins that gave us the idea,” she went on. “You'd already used the food against them once—we just did it again. They had us cooking for them, you see. They were stupid to trust us, especially after they'd taken the children. I even heard two of them talking, when the gate shifts changed over, the day after they'd taken the kids away.
Expecting trouble tonight, after yesterday?
one of them said to the soldier coming off shift. His friend just shrugged, said,
Why? It's not as if it's even their kids.
”

I was watching the Ringmaster. His face was expressionless.

“They took all the children under ten,” June went on. “They cleared out the holding houses, and I saw the soldiers dragging my neighbor's adopted children away, kicking and screaming.” Her face hardened. “So when we got your message, we were ready to act. There's belladonna, climbing up the embankment behind the market square. And hemlock, in the ditches by the wall. Four of us sneaked out after the curfew, to pick as much as we could. Even then, we couldn't poison all the soldiers. The first shift was already getting sick not long after sunset, before the next shift came into the mess hall. Some of them died. A lot more were collapsing. They realized pretty quickly what we'd done. Had already whipped three of the cooks by the time the attack started. It would have gotten ugly, in here, if you hadn't attacked when you said you would.”

It was already ugly, I thought, picturing the slow deaths of the poisoned soldiers. But I had no right to judge June for it. The people of New Hobart had done what we asked, more successfully than I could have imagined.

June turned to face the Ringmaster. “But we didn't risk everything just to find ourselves under a new occupying force.”

The Ringmaster stood. “You're not the only one who risked everything. I've given up my seat on the Council. My soldiers have risked their lives to defend you. Your ragtag army of Omegas was on the brink of being massacred when we arrived. If you think your forces are capable of withstanding a Council attack on New Hobart, I invite you to take over the defense of the town. Until then, be grateful.”

“Grateful?” spat Zoe.

“I don't relish working with you any more than you do with me,” he said quietly. “We all want to stop the machines. I don't wish harm on you people. Not like the Reformer or the General. I just want to manage the situation, to avoid another catastrophe like the blast.”

“
Manage the situation
,” I said. “All of us in refuges, eventually—that's what you mean, isn't it? Locked out of sight, in work camps, where we can't be seen, let alone have lives of our own.”

At my raised voice, Xander began rocking backward and forward, hands pressed over his ears.

The Ringmaster ignored him. “It would mean security and stability, for Omegas as well as Alphas,” he said. “And it's better than what your twin is proposing.”

“They're not our choices,” shouted Piper. “We don't have to choose between you and him, or the General—”

“We're wasting time,” said Sally, interrupting. “This isn't going to help us. We fought together, and we won. That's more than we expected. We've kept this town from the tanks. But it's only the beginning. If we bicker, we'll just make it easier for the Council to fight back.” She turned to the Ringmaster. “How much of the army do you command, and will they stay loyal to you?”

If he was taken aback at having to answer to an old woman in a threadbare shawl, he didn't show it.

“I'd say perhaps half the army will follow me, if it comes to that,” he
said. “The Reformer and the General have been so seduced by the machines, they've underestimated what the taboo means to most people. I've had defectors coming to me, ever since the first rumors about the machines began to spread. Most of those who aren't already here have left Wyndham, to muster to the west, inland of Sebald's Bay.”