Wise Man Jesker nodded crisply, as if glad Linna had come to her senses. “Now hush, girl, and let us work.”
He turned away from her, tossing aside the blood-soaked sheet and yanking up the Empress’s nightgown. He cursed under his breath.
The Brother was a young man with a prominent Adam’s apple, and now it bobbed up and down as he gave a nervous swallow and knelt next to Jesker. He wore the same grey robes as the Wise Man next to him, which meant that, like the majority of Brothers, he’d also been trained as a Wise Man. But unlike Jesker, Anthon’s robes were cinched at the waist with a wide leather belt instead of a simple cord. A number of pouches hung from the belt, bulging with the herbs and vials and jars the Brother-healers used in their art. He drew out three vials from his belt, setting them on the floor between himself and the Empress before sitting back on his heels and closing his eyes. He drew a deep breath, nostrils flaring.
Seconds ticked by. Precious seconds in which the Empress’s body pumped out more of her lifeblood.
Linna’s skin prickled with the effort of waiting silently, and the elixir inside her made it even harder to be still. She didn’t want to just stand here and watch; she wanted to sprint from the room, drive her sword into the first enemy she found. Yet she would not leave the Empress again. Must not. Linna clenched both hands into fists, nails digging so sharply into her palms that she was going to draw blood if she wasn’t careful. The Empress’s skin had grown so pale that it looked like candle wax. The bleeding started to slow, but Linna worried it was because she had no more blood to lose.
Linna forced herself to look away – it was the only way she could stop herself from shouting at the Brother to do something already.
She glanced instead into the sitting room, where Gileon, Gery, and a third guard stood at the barricade they’d recreated. Gileon’s face was close to the double doors, which were open just a crack, just enough to see who or what was outside. A lot of good it would do him if a Brother skilled in illusions made himself invisible and shoved a blade through that crack and into Gileon’s face. Outside the chambers, Linna could still hear the sounds of fighting and the screams of dying men.
The susurration of Brother Anthon’s chanting drew Linna’s attention away from the guards and back towards the dying Empress. His hands hovered above the Empress’s wound now, a soft blue glow radiating from the fingertips.
Linna held her breath, waiting for something to change, waiting for the Empress to suddenly open her eyes and smile, saying everything was alright.
But those were the wishes of a child, not the wish of the Empress’s personal guard. Akella had run off, the Commander was gone, and Ammanta was dead. Gileon, Gery, and the guard in the other room may or may not be competent. Which meant the Empress’s fate rested only in Linna’s hands.
What would the Commander do? Surely she wouldn’t simply sit and wait, staring at Brother Anthon and the Empress. No, the Commander would be taking action, planning the next move. And what would that next move be?
Safety. The Commander’s first priority was always the Empress’s safety above all else.
Linna closed her eyes for a moment, forcing her elixir-saturated mind to slow down so she could think clearly.
Linna realized she needed to know how bad the fighting was outside. If Castle Tergos was about to be overrun, then she needed to get the Empress out as soon as it was safe to move her. If the assault was already petering out, then it was likely the Empress was already in the safest place she could be.
Linna walked to the window. The view didn’t show much; the Empress’s chambers were several stories up, and the window faced the east. She could see the eastern wall of the castle’s outer keep, and beyond that, lower again by at least ten feet, the eastern wall of Pellon. Usually, soldiers roamed the castle walls – not many, just a handful – but no one was there now. They must have left their positions to stop an assault somewhere else. That, or they’d already been killed. A grim thought.
Linna squinted in the direction of the mountains. The sun was still in the east, so it was difficult to see in that direction, but – yes, there. On the horizon.
Mother Moon and Preyla’s tit.
Backlit by the sun, a roiling silhouette moved steadily westward towards Pellon. Mountain men. A horde of them. And not only mountain men, but also two enormous wooden structures pulled by teams of oxen. Linna went cold. Until this moment, she’d only ever seen pictures of trebuchets in books, but that was undeniably what they were – huge trebuchets on wheels.
Mountain men were terrible at siege warfare. How did they suddenly have trebuchets with them? And the land east of Pellon consisted of miles upon miles of gently rolling fields, with no cover to speak of. How had a horde so large – for Father Mezzu’s sake, a horde pulling two giant trebuchets – not been spotted sooner?
But Linna had the answers to her questions before she’d finished thinking them: the Brotherhood. Engineering was one of the specialties of the Wise Men, and Brothers came mostly from the ranks of Wise Men. And it only took a handful of competent Brothers skilled in the shadow art of illusion to disguise the movements of an army – Linna knew that first-hand.
Her gaze flicked between the incoming horde and the outer edge of Pellon’s eastern wall.
Linna spun on her heel. “How much longer?” she asked Wise Man Jesker urgently.
Jesker glanced between Brother Anthon and the Empress. “Fifteen minutes. At most.”
Fifteen minutes was too long, too long. The horde would be two-thirds of the way to the wall by then – and at that distance, the trebuchets would be close enough to start pelting the castle with their missiles.
“The moment it’s safe to move her, we’re leaving,” Linna told the Wise Man. She heard steel in her own voice. For once, she’d sounded like the Commander without even trying.
She jogged into the sitting room and told Gileon about what she’d spotted out the window. He frowned like he didn’t believe her at first, but one look out the window changed his expression from a disbelieving frown to wide-eyed shock.
“Mother Moon,” Gery breathed. “We’re all goin’ t’die.”
“Oi, don’t talk like that,” Gileon told him sharply. “Nobody’s got leave to die til the Empress is safely away.” He turned to Linna. “The problem’s in the getting away. You got any ideas?”
Linna’s mind flashed to the sewer tunnels. The entrance, though, was sure to be crawling with Brothers fighting soldiers. She and Akella had gotten through that way due to a combination of elixir and the Brothers’ distraction. If she headed for the entrance again with a Wise Man, an allied Brother, three guards in palace blacks, and an unconscious Empress, they were going to draw attention regardless of how much fighting was happening.
Yet it was still the best option.
“Yes,” Linna said after a moment’s hesitation. “But we won’t get her out without a fight.”
The third guard, who’d been listening the whole time, lifted his chin. “Fighting’s what we do, lass.”