The Tree of Story (46 page)

“Have you heard how the battle is going?” Balor asked his escort. No one answered.

They reached a crossroads between the street they were on and two other narrow lanes, and Kenning raised a hand and brought the party to a halt. On all sides, figures emerged from the shadows.

A voice spoke quietly in the dark.

“You’d better lay down your arms, lads. You’re outnumbered.”

“Let us pass,” Kenning said, and for the first time there was a catch of hesitation in his voice. “Hindering officers of the Errantry is an act of treason. This man is a traitor who must answer for his crimes.”

“Well, he’s also my friend,” the voice said, and Balor recognized it then. “And he’s probably the best hope your Errantry’s got right now. So we’re going to hinder you, I’m afraid.”

Kenning shared a quick glance with his troops, and without a word they lowered their weapons to the ground. A moment later matches flared and lanterns glowed on every side. One of them lit the broad, beaming face of Miles Plunkett.

* * *

Fewer than a hundred were gathered in the square. A handful of his fellow Errantry knights, Balor was cheered to see, along with troopers, scouts, apprentices, many of those not much more than boys. A few, like Miles Plunkett, were ordinary folk who’d defied the curfew and were determined to help save their city. Hutch Kenning and his troopers had joined them, too. Whatever influence Brax had over their minds they’d shrugged off quickly when they found themselves in the midst of friends.

No one spoke as Balor made his way through the crowd and climbed onto the rim of the fountain. They had been waiting for him, he realized. Waiting for the most experienced officer in this little insurrection to speak the words that would lead them into battle. He liked to talk well enough, to tell a joke and sing a song, but he’d never had to make a speech like this.

Balor cleared his throat.

“From what I’m told we may find the gates held against us,” he said. “We can try to persuade the sentries to let us pass, but if that fails we will have to force our way through. Let us remember that these are our comrades. They’re carrying out their duty as they see it. If we can help it, let us shed no blood until we face our real enemy on the battlefield.”

“Those armoured things out there,” someone in the crowd shouted, “I heard that they don’t have any blood to shed. That nothing can kill them.”

“Perhaps not, but they can be broken,” Balor said. “They can be stopped. I’ve seen it done. Our allies have come from every corner of the Realm to defend us while the Errantry cowers behind what’s left of our walls. That isn’t right. We may be breaking the martial law imposed on this city. We may be branded as traitors for what we do this day. I say so
be it, as long as we hold true to the oath we took when we joined the Errantry: to protect the weak and the innocent—if need be with our lives. Let us do that now.”

There was silence when he had finished. No drawing of swords, no voices raised in cheer.
We’re rebels, after all
, Balor thought.
We have to go quietly
. But he felt what was stirring in those gathered around him, and he saw it in their eyes. They would stand with him, whatever they met on the other side of those gates.

Freya saw with the eyes of the dragon.

She was with her friends from Skald, she knew, in the midst of the thousands upon thousands of knights and warriors and soldiers who had come to Fable from the four corners of the Realm and perhaps beyond.

She stood among them but apart from them and looked down the valley. She saw with utter clarity the long, snakelike column of fetches coming up the Course, marching without pause or hesitation to their goal. And then she seemed to see that column running backward in time, through the days and nights of its ceaseless march, to the place where this armour had been forged, a land of fire and ice that her own people had once called home. She was seeing with the dragon’s eyes, but also with the long memory of her people, the Skaldings, who had been driven from this northern land in ages past. She saw the ringed city of Adamant and the forges in its smoky depths where the fetches had been trapped and sealed into this armour of enchanted metal. She saw the Ironwise as they had been, the Eldersmiths in the time of their greatness and prosperity. Her own people had known them and traded with them. And she saw them as they were now, walled off in their deep chambers and tunnels, frantically scrabbling with picks and hammers at what was left of the precious, deadly
ore. But there was almost none for them to find. The great vein of fever iron beneath the city had been nearly exhausted by those who had forged the fetch armour. The dwarf city would never be what it once was. The Ironwise had doomed themselves to a slow death in that barren waste.

Without warning her icy vision showed a great wooden ship with tall masts and white sails, a ship filled with grim, warlike men, but the ship was not sailing on the sea. It was soaring through dark clouds, through sheets of rain. The warriors inside it were coming to the Bourne, but as conquerors or friends she could not say.

Then she saw the face of someone she knew. A young man on board the ship. He was wearing black armour and his lank, dust-matted hair fell over a face that was haggard and bloodless.

Finn Madoc.

Beneath the ice that had sealed off her heart, she felt fear clutch at her. She called Finn’s name, and then her sight faltered and the ship vanished, and she felt as if she were rushing back herself over the long miles, to the battlefield.

The Nightbane had parted to let the fetch host pass, but they themselves were holding back now. Their battle fury had been cooled by the blizzard that had ravaged their lines and might return at any time, for all they knew. They were content to let these mindless instruments accomplish what they had so far failed to do.

If they were not stopped, the fetches would plow through the hastily assembling defenders and then through the walls and lay waste to everyone and everything within the city. But Freya’s vision of the dwarf city had shown her the one weakness in their enemy: if their armour was broken open, the fetches within would be released and drift away harmlessly, without purpose. The armour would become an empty shell.

“Freya.” A voice was calling her. She blinked and turned slowly. Eymund Spearbreaker’s hand was on her shoulder.

“Freya,” he said. “Are you all right?”

She gazed at her friends in turn, at the former Errantry knight Brannon Yates, shivering with the pain of his craving for the
gaal
but with his sword at the ready. In her own hand was the sword of blue ice, all that was left of Whitewing Stonegrinder. She had thought, when she first took it in her hand, that it would shatter easily, like the icicles she used to break off the eaves of her father’s smithy when she was a child. But when she had struck this sword against the ground, it had not shattered, and she’d felt the strength and power in it. The dragon had left her the sword for
this
, for Fable’s last stand against the fetches.

She looked now at the wall of armoured death on its way toward her, bristling with terrible, cruel weapons. She was no warrior; she had never fought in a battle before. She would likely die here and never see her home and her family again.

Why am I not afraid?
she thought. And then the answer came.
This sword in my hand is the dragon’s heart. His blood still runs in my veins
.

“Follow me, Eymund,” she said. “Follow me, all of you.”

She held the heart of Whitewing Stonegrinder aloft and started forward, toward the enemy. Her friends followed, and the knights and soldiers of a hundred lands marched with them.

The Duke saw the slender gleam of Freya’s sword from where he sat on his warhorse at the edge of the woods. It was too soon, he thought. He had given no order. But there was nothing to be done. Battle was about to be joined and his troops were needed. He brought his silver mace down, and a great thundering mass of horsemen poured from the trees. On the
other side of the Course, King Shakya saw the mace fall, and with a great cry his warriors charged down the slope.

By this time the head of the fetch host had plunged across the stream and were coming up the other side, where they were met by the vanguard of the allied army. As before, the two sides met with a crash of steel, but the result this time was very different. The fetches came on inexorably, an unstoppable tide, and although many of them carried great clubs and spiked iron staves in their gauntleted fists, they hardly bothered to wield them but simply mowed through the defenders as if through a field of tall grass. The defenders, for their part, drove at the fetches with swords and spears, but most of the blows they landed glanced off the armour harmlessly. Then they would be shouldered aside or fall beneath the iron feet of the host.

Those who were driven or fled back toward Fable expected to see the gates closed against them, as they had been since the siege began. To their surprise, the gates were opened and troopers were marching out, led by a small band of knights on horseback.

The Errantry had come at last.

* * *

Freya and her companions reached the front lines. Freya gave a cry and swung the ice sword with all her strength at the fetch that made for her. The blade cleaved through the faceless helmet and the fetch shuddered to a halt. Freya drew out the blade and staggered back. A wispy grey shadow slid from the rent in the helmet like thick smoke. It curled and flowed toward the defenders so that some cried out and dropped to the ground in fear. But the shadow had no force or will, and only drifted away into the dust and smoke.

“Don’t be afraid of them,” Freya cried to those around her. “Once the armour is broken they’re harmless.”

The next rank of fetches was upon her, and she swung the sword and shattered the shoulder guard of the nearest one. It came to a sudden halt like the first one and the same unearthly grey shadow poured out and vanished.

The defenders who had seen this rallied and charged forward once more, and some hacked again and again at the fetches until they succeeded in cracking the armour, as well. Some were not so lucky and they fell before their enemy and were trampled by the surging mass of iron feet.

At that moment the cavalry slammed into the column of fetches from both sides and drove into it like two spearpoints. Some of the fetches staggered and fell as they were knocked into one another, and the column was breached and broken in places. Metal rang on metal. The mace of the Duke split open the breastplate of one. The King’s great spear pierced another. But most simply bludgeoned their way through, so that the horsemen seemed to be floundering through a churning river of iron.

Freya and the other Skaldings were in the midst of the column, too, holding their ground as well as they could as the fetches came at them. Yet each of them could only face one fetch at a time, and many flowed around them and rejoined the column, and it continued its unstoppable advance toward the gates of Fable. Here they were met by Balor Gruff’s small force, swelled now by the troops that had turned and run but had rallied at the arrival of unexpected aid from the Errantry.

Balor had spread his troops in a line across the field, to make a final wall between the enemy and the gates of Fable. But Balor himself and the few fellow knight-errants who had joined him spurred their mounts and, with a great cry, drove into the midst of the fetches.

Then for an instant it seemed as if the sun had sheared through the clouds. A white bolt of lightning lanced down
into the churning mass of the fetch host, with a crack of thunder that shook the ground. Shattered pieces of armour flew through the air, and then all was dim and smoky again. Moments later another bolt tore open the sky, striking close to the Viceroy’s carriage. A third blasted into the woods at the edge of the Course, and soon trees were burning and adding a thicker pall of smoke to the gloom. The defenders gazed up, searching for the source of the lightning, and they saw something they could not understand: the hull of a ship descending out of the clouds.

Only Freya knew where this ship had come from and whom it carried.

The ship had its sails furled and it descended swiftly. Men shouted warnings to one another and scattered, as the shuddering hull struck the advancing column and plowed across it, sending armoured fetches flying through the air along with a great plume of stones and earth and dust. Freya dropped to the ground with her friends and shielded her eyes as the dust cloud swept across them.

The earth shook. With a cracking and groaning of timbers, the ship came to rest.

The iron worm had not been stopped, but it had been broken in two.

The defenders watched in stunned amazement as gangplanks slid out from the sides of the ship, and men and mordog and other Storyfolk of unknown kind hurried down to join the battle.

There were so many of them that some climbed over the sides and jumped to the ground. Those who witnessed this gave a cry of joy, for they understood now that these newcomers were on their side and there was a chance the tide of the battle could be turned. As the last of the new arrivals
leaped from the side of the ship, a deep rumbling could be heard, and the hull was torn open by fire and black smoke.

As the ship burned and its timbers collapsed, another figure stepped out of the wreckage, a towering man of clay. He did not join his companions in the battle, however, but walked calmly to the aft of the ship, bent to its flat keel and dug his arms down underneath it into the churned, blackened earth.

There was another groan of stressed timbers, and the ship rose slowly and ponderously from the ground. The clay man lifted the burning wreck over his head, paused for a moment in which everyone who witnessed this feat held their breath, and then hurtled the ship through the air at the oncoming fetches. It plummeted on them like a castle falling out of the sky, burying dozens in a shattering, blazing mass of wood and metal.

The clay man did not stop then but marched into the midst of the host himself. He picked up one of the armoured fetches, cracked it open in his mighty arms, then swung the lifeless, broken armour into its fellows, scattering fetches in every direction.