Part 1
Have some faith.
James waited for the rest. An explanation. An order. Anything that would turn three words into concrete assurance.
Saralta's horse passed beneath the citadel arch, and Seraphina gave him nothing more.
He twisted to look back. Bisera stood with a guard at her elbow, giving another order. Even now. Even after everything.
"Please, let me down," he said.
Saralta's breath caught against his shoulder, and for a moment he thought he had reached her.
"I will not lose both of you because neither can bear to leave the other."
At the narrow upper postern on the hill's river face, her men lifted him down so they could lead the horses through. The moment his boots touched stone, he tried to pull free, and Saralta's hand closed around his wrist. Her grip did not give.
"Do not make me carry you."
"Then let go."
He saw the struggle within her.
"No," she said after a few seconds.
Bisera came as far as the upper side of the postern and no farther. She kept clear of the descending files, making room for everybody except herself, and by that he knew she had not changed her mind. He held her with his eyes until a shoulder, a horse, and the stone lintel took her from him.
Below the switchbacks, Saralta took him into the saddle in front of her and locked her arms around him again. Beyond Riverside Gate I, her forty-five riders closed around them for the long ride east.
The postern had brought them out of the fortress. It had not brought them across the river.
A Gillyrian patrol among the willows counted them and withdrew to signal. Saralta let it go.
At the Braids, they dismounted. The mare set one hoof on the plank footing and stopped, ears flat at the black water. Saralta spoke to her in the same low voice she used whenever James fought her grip.
"One step. That is all."
He hated that gentleness more than he could have hated force.
Cold water climbed his legs. The handline burned his palm. Behind him, the city was smoke and stone, and somewhere inside it was his wife.
"Bisera," he said.
The river took the name.
Part 2
While Saralta rode the bank, the guard Bisera had sent found Marcus at the southern upper gate with her orders: the Great Mage had been escorted out safely; she had gone back for Vesmir; close and pack the gate, then bring the final detachment to the citadel.
Captain Marcus looked down his line. Fifty men. Faces he knew.
"Inside. Last pair under the gatehouse bows. No one runs."
They came in backward, shields touching. The leaves swung shut; a spear struck the outer wood a heartbeat before the bar dropped. Then they packed the passage with earth-filled baskets, stone, and braces under salvaged beams.
When the last brace held, Marcus looked at it: an ugly thing of dirt, split timber, and stone taken from a collapsing city.
He had never been prouder of anything he had built.
"North."
They climbed to the citadel with the wounded in the middle, men who had spent the morning killing now helping a comrade uphill by the elbow.
Bisera was waiting beside Vesmir's shutter. The captain was conscious enough to object to his bearers, his coverings, and the idea of wasting soldiers to carry him out. She took all three complaints as encouraging news.
"The southern gate?" she asked Marcus.
"Barred. Packed. Braced."
"All accounted for?"
"All who came inside with me."
At the northern postern, the descent beyond lay empty. Far below, a horn answered from the river quarter.
Marcus bowed until his forehead nearly touched the rim of his shield, and stayed there.
"Captain."
His shoulders moved once. She wanted to lay a hand on them. But if she did, he might kneel, and if he knelt, the men behind him would follow, and there would be an hour of grief when she had time only for an order.
"Do not let grief become disobedience," she said softly. "Execute my order."
She waited until he lifted his face.
"You have held every place I asked you to hold. Do not make my last order the one you refuse. The children beyond the river will need men who know their fathers' names. The wounded will need carrying after courage has ceased to make them light. Take your shields north. Keep faith with one another. That is the work I am giving you now."
Her breath broke on the last word. Marcus drew his shield against his chest—not in argument this time. Behind him, the men straightened, one after another. He straightened last, and with difficulty.
Bisera laid her palm on Vesmir's coat. Beneath the crooked stitching, the parchment crackled. The hour. The witnesses. James's name beside hers.
"Deliver it."
Vesmir tried to speak.
"It is the last order I have left that anyone can carry out."
His hand covered hers. She slipped off her loosened gauntlet to hold his hand in her bare one, and her silver band snagged on a frayed thread at his cuff. The small tug brought back Saralta opening her fist in the chapel: two rings that should not have fitted, and a roomful of people refusing, for one moment, to let the war turn their story into a tragedy.
She freed the ring and drew the gauntlet on again.
The shutter passed beneath the arch. Shields followed, some slung across backs so their owners could help another man down. Her own guards went last.
Bisera counted until there was no one left to count.
Then she drew the leaves shut, dropped the inner bar, and wedged it home.
On the far side, something touched the wood.
She did not lift the bar.
The western postern was blocked; Marcus's work filled the southern gate. No open door waited behind her men. There were other ways over a wall, but she could not guard them all.
She took the long road south towards the enemy.
A little after noon, she reached the southern gatehouse. The upper town had become a body from which the breath had gone. A pail lay on its side outside a stable, and she almost righted it, as though someone would come back and need it.
At a kitchen doorway, a lingering smell of onions stopped her, and hunger clenched beneath her ribs. James had once set a plate before her and watched her eat with a noblewoman's careful manners, starving as she was. She tried to remember whether there had been onions in that breakfast. She remembered only his hands closing around hers to warm them.
She climbed the gatehouse stair one step at a time, a hand against the cold wall. On the fighting top, she lifted the horn the watch had left and sounded the muster call herself.
No soldier within the upper circuit answered.
Part 3
The veteran on the roof saw her first.
For an hour he had lain on the cold tiles, an arrow across his bow, watching the closed gate and empty crenels.
Then a woman stepped onto the parapet and took off her helmet.
Golden hair loosened in the wind. He knew her before she raised the sword. All he had to do was draw. Instead his fingers slackened, and the arrow slid an inch along the stave.
At the head of the Golden Lions, a centurion felt the ranks lose their motion. A shield bumped a shield, and the usual curse never came.
"Forward—" the centurion began. Then he saw her too.
All morning he had fought in anticipation of victory—with the hope of seeing his newborn daughter for the first time. Now that hope seemed close to fulfilment.
"Spirit be merciful," he said without meaning to.
The silence ran backward through the army like a loosened seam, until men too far back to see anything were listening to the spaces between the sounds. On the roof, the veteran laid his arrow beside his knee carefully, as though a small noise might start the whole thing again.
The siege had not ended; only the men who could see the gatehouse realised victory was close.
Above them, Bisera held the sword high.
Not toward death. Toward witness.
She had sworn before her liege and the garrison, and an oath made before witnesses required witnesses at its close. If she could not hold the city, she could make the men taking it witness her fulfilment of the oath.
Yet she was no longer certain that keeping the oath was the right choice. She kept it because she knew no honourable alternative that would keep faith with her oath before the Spirit. She could not risk a lifetime of devotion being ruined by a moment of weakness.
The thousands sheltering behind the Three Hills could not see her.
Only the Gillyrians could bear witness now.
Below, the centurion found his voice. "Hold your ground. Keep the road clear."
He was especially careful. After all, he could not fail so close to victory.
Alexander had entered by the breach on foot.
He mounted the white stallion below the rubble and rode for the market beneath windows whose owners had fled or were waiting behind white cloth to learn what his victory meant. Ahead of him, hauliers dragged a compact ram uphill. At the foot of the upper-gate approach, he reined in.
There she was. Red-brown armour. Loose hair. A sword held high enough for every man below to understand it.
"How many behind her?"
No one could say, and the afternoon's reports were beginning to explain why. Everything his informants had described had materialised—the bridge, the wagons, the wounded, the cavalry breakout. A retreat worth resisting. A crossing worth reinforcing.
Behind it, the barracks had emptied. Standards, pack animals, officers, every store that could be carried: gone. In the western shelter courts, surrendered weapons lay stacked beneath white cloth.
"Families," Igor said. "Craftsmen, old men, disarmed militia. Nearly seven thousand. But almost every man who meant to keep a shield has left."
Alexander looked at the upper wall.
He had expected an army there.
Bisera had left him a woman.
"She assumed we would learn of the retreat," Igor said.
"She counted on it."
Neither Adelais nor the collaborators had lied to him. The mistake lay in the weight he had given to what they could see. He had reinforced the bridge, begun the assault before the withdrawal was done, pursued the visible column. Each decision had been defensible.
She had given every one of them the wrong centre.
For a moment his admiration was so sharp it felt like anger.
"Their rear may still be unsettled," Igor said.
"Keep the morning order. Shadow the routes. Do not strip this front for a pursuit." His eyes had not left the sword. "If she could fool us once, she could fool us again with an ambush."
Part 4
On the bank road, Marcus changed Vesmir's bearers for the third time. Vesmir was unusually silent, which worried Marcus more than the complaints had.
Behind them, a cord rigged by the engineers had dropped the bar of Riverside Gate I after the final file; above it, the northern postern had been shut by Bisera's own hand. No one could open either merely by following them.
At the Braids, the last rear companies were clearing into the Old North Channel. The crossing officer looked anxiously at Vesmir's bloodstained dressing as the bearers carried the shutter into the water.
On the north bank, Velika—who had carried blankets east herself—had Vesmir's dressing half cut away before he was set down.
Vesmir caught Marcus's wrist and mentioned the sheets inside his coat. Marcus borrowed Velika's knife and cut the swollen thread without touching the sheets beneath. Inside the stained outer fold, the writing was clear: the hour, the witnesses, the names.
"It happened," Vesmir said.
"I know."
"They must all know."
Marcus understood then why Vesmir had guarded the coat as fiercely as the wound. When people began turning this day into history, someone would need to say that before the city fell, a woman had married the man she loved. Not a rumour. Not a mercy invented afterward. Ink, witnesses, an hour in which it had been true.
He wrapped the sheets in linen and oilcloth and slid them back inside Vesmir's coat.
When the last shields were over, the guards cut the handlines. Rope fell into black water. The broken mill footings remained; the road they had made for frightened families was gone.
Marcus looked back toward Podem, at the legend that would be told for generations in Vakeria. If Vakeria managed to survive.
Part 5
Eleven days, perhaps.
Alexander counted the relays south in his mind as he looked at Bisera and the victory at hand: eleven days for a mounted advance if the road past Adrianoklus could be forced, longer for the foot. Every day spent chasing scattered Vakerian soldiers was a day his sister might not have.
"We could pursue across the river," Igor said.
Not today. Deal with the greater threat first.
"No. The retreating Vakerian army would be struggling against the winter anyways. And we cannot spare any more grain we need for the road back on additional prisoners."
White cloth appeared beyond the guard line: a small delegation from the western streets. A woman planted herself before an officer and demanded to know whether her Vakerian husband had the same protection she did.
"He surrendered his spear. Before dawn. He is a potter's son, not a captain."
"Then he is protected."
Alexander turned his horse to face captains and delegates together.
"Those who laid down their weapons before our entry are residents of this city. They are not spoils merely because their sons marched north, and a Vakerian name is not a weapon concealed under a coat. Commanders will answer for the men they send into a house. Elders will give their names and their needs here; the households remain under cover. We have broken a wall to recover an imperial city. Any man who mistakes that for leave to destroy it will answer to me."
The woman stared up at Alexander in awe until another member of the delegation prodded her to step aside.
Above the market, Bisera remained standing.
He wanted her alive.
Not as an ornament for a triumph, but across a map table, seeing the weaknesses his own officers were too respectful to name. Throughout his reign he had gathered such talent in pursuit of Gillyria's restoration. A great empire, after all, needed great people at its helm.
But he could not see how to bring her in without destroying what made her worth bringing. Bisera's undying allegiance belonged to the very Vakeria he was making war upon. Were she truly to break it for him, she would no longer be the loyal, gifted commander he so valued.
She wanted an honourable death, and he alone could grant it—the last courtesy he could offer an opponent who had refused every other. Taking her alive would cost the lives of more of his men. The answer that would save his soldiers agreed conveniently with the one he considered merciful.
Let her have the glorious death she desired.
He raised his hand toward the captain whose archers watched the parapet. Before he could speak, a woman at the edge of the delegation pulled off a healer's cap. Red hair slipped free. She lifted her face, and the words caught in his throat.
From the wall, Bisera watched the delegation approach Alexander with warm deference.
The hurt came before she could brush it aside.
Serko had been right. Her plan to evacuate the civilians for their protection might have been unnecessary from the start.
They belonged to Podem regardless of which banner flew over it.
Then she spotted the fiery red hair.
She had defended that woman from her own captains. Burns had healed under Adelais's hands; children had eaten; James had pitied her. Her tired mind tried hard not to arrange it into the simple shape of betrayal.
So be it. She had wanted the wounded cared for. They had been cared for.
Brought through the guard line, Adelais knelt in the mud beyond the white stallion's foreleg, at the proper distance for a retainer.
"Adelais. It is good to see you again."
Relief broke across his face before he caught it.
"Your Majesty. The city is clear. General Bisera is the last Vakerian soldier within its walls."
"You have done great work. It will not go unrewarded."
"The honour of serving Your Majesty is reward enough," Adelais replied.
Then her fingers tightened on the cap. "But may I beg Your Majesty's ear for a moment longer?"
"You may. Speak freely."
Alexander waited.
"Some time ago, when suspicion fell on me, Bisera's soldiers seized me at the water barrels, and her captains meant to imprison and question me. I had been putting herbs near the water; they thought I had fouled it. She stopped them, for there was not enough evidence, and she held me under both her watch and her protection." Adelais lifted her eyes. "I believe she is a lady of noble intent. She said, 'We do not punish on fear alone,' and she kept me safe until further evidence could be found." Her voice trembled, as though speaking in his presence were already draining all the courage she could muster.
He waited patiently for her to gather her thoughts.
"I spent this morning in one of the shelters. A child kept asking whether they would be spared. His mother told him to be quiet, because she did not know. I told them of Your Majesty's great mercy—of your wisdom, your kindness and your justice."
Her voice caught. She would have preferred to give him an orderly report. An orderly report had brought her here.
"I do not pretend she is harmless. I only beg—perhaps, if it is possible—that Your Majesty might make her an example of your mercy before the people of Podem."
A tear fell onto the cap.
His expression changed. There was a softness in it she had never been able to earn by service, and the thought that it was owed to another woman hurt more than the mud beneath her knees. She desperately wanted to look away, but she dared not.
Alexander had heard that cadence before: not a subject begging indulgence, but the echo of a people's plea that he show himself the ruler he had promised to be.
For an instant, a tense silence fell over the cold market; no one around them knew what to expect.
His hand had already lowered. He could not refuse a face so like Irene's. He realised he had changed his mind and disliked how eagerly his thoughts were finding reasons to make the change respectable.
Above them, the ram struck its first blow—a deep wooden thud that seemed to travel through the ground rather than the air.
"Rise. You shall not kneel in this mud again."
She rose. He bent from the saddle until only she and Igor could hear. "I will take her alive, if she can be taken. You have my word."
His falconers had brought him a few intercepted dispatches from Simon; he had read every word and kept them. Each contained an order to retreat, more urgent than the last, and something about a certain Selene being too preoccupied with the demonic rebellion to deliver messages. Alexander had taken most of their contents for code or information meant to damage Gillyrian morale if intercepted. But Simon's insistence that Bisera retreat seemed unmistakable.
He had already sent a messenger with a few of them, hoping she would give up the city without an assault. The man had brought them back with a courteous refusal: Bisera would not discuss surrender. Without the Vakerian bird or rider that should have carried them, the letters could be Gillyrian forgeries. Simon would have sent Selene, she had insisted.
He could try the letters again once she was his prisoner. Simon's orders might keep her from taking her own life. He would hold her as a hostage against any Vakerian attack while he settled matters in the south. The new deliberations quickly formed in Alexander's mind.
Then, Alexander turned to his captains: "The Vakerian general is to be taken alive. No archers against her. No missiles of any kind. Shields, spears and nets—to pin her, not to kill her. Fresh blocks in rotation, water below the landing. Lose as few men as possible, and bring me the count. Stop the ram. Lamps ready in the inner yard before the light fails. I have besieged this city for weeks. I can give one woman what remains of the afternoon."
"And if she does not tire, Majesty?" Igor asked.
"Everything tires. That is the only thing this war has proved."
Igor bowed. He had seen the raised hand falter when the cap came off, and he understood that, whatever reasons lay behind His Majesty's decision, it rested in great part on the face of the woman making the arguments rather than on their merit. It was one of the rare moments when feeling overruled reason in Alexander, and Igor was glad to let it pass.
Part 6
Beneath Bisera, the ram fell silent. On the roofs opposite, the archers who had been finding their angle lowered their bows without a shot. A captain below the gatehouse repeated the new order.
Alive.
She had prepared for the mine, the fire, the failed barricade; for dying with the sword she had carried since her teens. She had arranged a road for her men, a future for her husband, and witnesses for the last thing she believed she must do. She had never prepared for an enemy who refused to provide the ending.
Podem shall not fall while breath remains in my body.
They meant to keep the breath. Capture tore a hole in the covenant where the ending should have been.
And beneath the horror rose another thought: James. Alive might mean James again. That frightened her almost more than capture; hope would make her search for permission where honour did not permit. She pressed a hand over the ring beneath her gauntlet, then took the sword in both hands.
Below, the officers found the gates shut but most of the upper circuit undefended. Ladders went up east and west of the gatehouse, shielded men dropped into the yard behind her, and in the passage beneath her feet, men with bars began to worry at Marcus's packing.
Her ground was the gatehouse's fighting top: a dozen paces of paving between the parapet and the stair, with a wall-walk running off to either side. She had pulled down the timber bridge to the eastern wall, and the men beyond that gap stayed back. To the west, the wall-walk ran on in solid stone.
The first shields appeared at the stairhead. Her body answered before her mind had found an answer worth giving. Mana gathered along the old paths, and the exhaustion drew back.
The spear points came first, a comb of them over the rims, levelled low at her knees and thighs—meant to pin, not to kill. She struck the shafts, not the men. Ash split. Iron rang on the paving. She drove her shoulder into the gap between two shields, and for a heartbeat they blocked each other more thoroughly than they blocked her.
The leading man went down on one knee before her.
She could have killed him.
His sword was still in its sheath.
The smell of wet leather rose from his shield, sharp as the tack James had held while she taught him to mount. She had promised to teach him other things, in a life where hands could ache from work that did not require killing.
She struck the shield instead and sent him and the man behind him tumbling onto the landing. A net opened; she cut through it before it settled. She caught the second net at its gathered edge and pulled, and the men holding it learned together what it meant to tie themselves to a storm.
"He said she was to be taken alive," someone gasped below.
"He said as few of us as possible were to die doing it," the Golden Lions centurion snapped, hauling a young soldier back by the belt. "Keep your shield up and don't be one of them."
On the roof opposite, the veteran set his bow down on the tiles. At the back of the market, someone began to pray for Bisera.
The second push came slowly, one block locked in the close order the drill-masters called the foulkon, another advancing along the western wall-walk. Water passed back through the supporting ranks.
Bisera watched a soldier drink. Her mouth was so dry that swallowing hurt.
She broke the second push more slowly than the first, the third more slowly still. Between pushes she rested her sword point on the stone, because keeping it raised cost energy she was beginning to realise she had to conserve.
His men had water. Reliefs. Orders that let them come back down.
She had the time until they came again.
The stair had become an hourglass: fresh men at the bottom, one exhausted woman at the top, the day passing upward a shield's width at a time. She could scatter the next block. She could not scatter the afternoon.
He is not fighting me, she understood. He is waiting for me. He has made the whole army into a siege wall, and I am the city.
It was brilliant. It was merciful.
It was going to work.
Below, lamps were being readied for the inner yard, and an officer pointed at the shadows gathering on the steps. Alexander had counted those too.
She set her feet for the next push anyway.
Part 7
The fourth push came from three sides.
While she held the stair, they had bridged the eastern gap with ladders and planks. Now shields came along that wall-walk too: three hedges of points closing on the same dozen paces of stone.
She cut the first shafts and turned aside the second rank's shield rims with shoulder, blade, and her whole failing weight. A point she never saw raked across her thigh above the knee, below the skirt of her mail, and came away red.
It did not hurt yet. What arrived first, absurdly, was cosmetic concern.
One more.
On her wedding night, her arms had begun to fold over the old scars before she could stop them, and James had caught her wrists and reassured her with his actions. This one would be long and ugly across the front of her thigh.
He would find it. He would—
A laugh broke out of her, cracked and dreadful, and the man in front of her flinched from it more than from her sword.
She would be dead before the lamps were lit. She had spent her life among soldiers who wore their scars like decorations, and at the end of it she had caught herself worrying whether her husband would find her leg less lovely.
A fresh net opened above the western rims; the low points crowded her knees. One more step and they would have her down, breathing, with the city fallen around her.
Not dead. Taken.
She stopped rationing.
Mana did not gather now. It came—all of it, from wherever she had been hoarding it for a tomorrow that no longer existed. The spears before her stopped being a hedge and became kindling. She cut free of the net and drove the eastern block back onto its planks before it could set its feet, and the planks went, and the men on them went with the planks. She turned before the western block understood what it had seen. A shield split and folded shut on her blade; she tore it off its bearer's arm and stamped the steel free. Men ordered to pin her found that no one had given them an order for this.
She no longer turned the edge aside. She did not count. For the first time since dawn the tablets were behind her, and she was only a sword and the next breath, and the next.
The stair block came up into it because the ranks behind were pushing. Then it did not come up any more.
When there was nothing left in front of her, she was standing on what had been the fourth push—a shield rim, a shoulder, a spear shaft broken across a man's chest. Blood ran warm into her left boot and went cold there; a second cut she did not remember had opened along her forearm. Below the stairhead, the centurion was hauling the last of his men backward by their belts, and no one came up to take their places.
She stood on the dead and waited, swaying, for the fifth.
Their orders had been to keep her alive. She had known that when she struck. Knowing had not stopped her, and it did not leave her now.
From the outer approach, Alexander could see her above the parapet. The stair he could not see; the runners brought it to him instead—broken wrists, a dislocated shoulder, a face laid open by its owner's own shield rim.
Then the sound from the gatehouse changed—the sound of a fight that had stopped being a contest of patience. Shouts for bearers rose from the inner yard. A shield turned over the eastern parapet and fell to the approach. A man followed it and did not rise.
The next runner did not bring him wrists. He brought names. Alexander took the tablet himself; the wax had curled where the stylus had pressed. Above the parapet, Bisera stood where the fourth push had been. The tablet told him what lay beneath her.
It is not worth it.
Every man on that stair was a man he needed marching with him to put down the rebellion around the capital. There were archers on the roofs opposite, and no one on either side of this war would think less of him for using them now. She had asked for nothing else all day.
He had given Adelais his word in the mud. That was not why he hesitated. He told himself so and dared not examine his motives any further, lest he find a less-than-acceptable reason beneath them.
Nor could he let her go. By the coming autumn she might very well lay siege to Podem at the head of a new Vakerian army, and all his efforts would be for nothing. They would be at this again.
Which meant that he must kill her or take her.
Igor leaned close. "The chains. The ones we used on the Rosagarian princess. Theophilus brought two light engines in behind the ram. Their crews dropped fire vessels on the stairheads this morning; he swears they can drop a weighted net on her just as precisely. Pull the blocks off the stair and let the engines do it." A pause. "If she lives through it, she is in the net."
"And if she does not?"
Igor replied calmly, "Then you have tried your best."
"Very well."
He disliked how quickly the words came, and how much they sounded like permission.
At the edge of the market, Adelais watched a crew carry the first coil of chain past the white stallion. She looked up at Alexander. He was watching the gatehouse. Her fingers closed harder around the healer's cap.
Part 8
The fifth push did not come.
The blocks drew back. The stair emptied. The men on the wall-walks withdrew, leaving their dead where they lay. Bisera did not trust it. She had never trusted an enemy who stopped doing something that was working.
She looked over the parapet. Beyond the silent ram, crews were winching round the arms of two throwing engines. Beside them, men were folding chain nets into shallow baskets—chain, not rope, heavy links that rang even at this distance—and lashing stones to the nets' corners.
She knew what chain meant. It was how they had captured Saralta: the hidden trench, the weighted chains, a princess brought down like a bear in a pit and rolled in iron until she could not move.
Podem shall not fall while breath remains in my body.
The chain would keep the breath and take the rest.
She would not give them that. It was not far from the parapet to the approach; she had jumped from worse on worse legs. Down among the engine crews, no man would wait for orders once a woman with a sword was among them. She would break what she could of the throwing arms before they cut her down. It would be quick.
She took the sword in both hands and set her good foot on the parapet.
The wind changed.
It had died with the light. Now every banner on the approach snapped out the same way at once, then the other way, and the snow rose.
It came off the gatehouse's lead roofing and the burned rows of houses, off every ledge and gutter of the upper town, and it did not fall again. It went round. A white wall of swirling snow rose out of nothing and turned, and the gatehouse was inside it, and the approach, and the engines, and the stair. Their outlines blurred and vanished.
She could not see her own hands on the hilt.
Pressure came before sound. Then the sound arrived, late and out of sequence, a roar like a river in spate heard from inside the water.
She had time to think the engines, and no—too soon, and then a hand came over her shoulder from behind.
A folded cloth was already at her face. Sweetness. Bruised root beneath wet flowers. Something like the bitter sponges Velika kept for cutting and cautery—and something else, a pressure moving through breath and blood faster than any healer's draught.
She caught the wrist. A soldier's grip. She put the last of her strength into it and pulled.
The wrist did not move.
There was no strain in it. No answering effort. It was like taking hold of the corner of a monument and pulling it.
So this was how it came. Not a spear. Not the chain. A hand that did not need to strain, out of the white, at the end.
Her sword struck the stone.
No, I must not yield.
She tried once more to pull the hand from her face. Then the dark took her.
Part 9
From Alexander's position, the city simply went white.
Every torch along the approach laid its flame flat in the same direction, and the stallion's mane lifted against his hand. Snow came off the roofs in sheets and turned. In a dozen heartbeats the gatehouse was gone, and the wall, and the engines, and his own standard at the edge of the market.
"HOLD!" Igor's voice crashed across the approach. "NO ONE LOOSES! NO ONE THROWS!"
Alexander rose in his stirrups and saw nothing but white moving in a circle, grit and ice stinging his face.
Under the wind he felt something familiar—the gathering he felt in his own body before a blow he meant to land. Not natural weather. Mana channelled beyond the body, shaping the wind itself.
It was brief. Then it drew away northward over the roofs toward the citadel, like a sheet pulled off a bed. The gatehouse came back, and beside the nearer engine a folded net still lay in its basket, its crew flat on their faces in the snow.
A soldier edged onto the fighting top and shouted down: her sword lay among the dead. The general was gone.
"Riders," Alexander said. "North, round by the river road. Find her. If someone has her, do not shoot through the general."
His voice sounded ordinary. He was grateful for that.
Adelais had both hands over her mouth.
The northern watchers saw the white pour over the upper circuit like surf over a breakwater and roll down through the riverside gardens. It stopped at the lower wall, as though the wall had been built to hold it.
Near Riverside Gate I, a veiled woman came out of the edge of the white along the top of the wall, dropped to the bank, and ran. The gate's leaves stayed shut. She was carrying someone in her arms, red-brown armour and all, as though the armour weighed no more than cloth. She turned east along the bank.
The watch's riders learned how poor the footing was over a little more than a mile and a quarter, while the woman ahead crossed frozen hollows in a series of effortless bounds. Snow lifted off the bank behind her, closed over her, and opened again farther on.
By the time the first patrol reached the abandoned guide stakes, she was among the gravel bars. The handlines were down. She went across by gravel, masonry, broken stone—one impossible bound after another—and vanished with Bisera into the reeds of the Old North Channel.
The patrol's report reached Alexander within the hour. The closed postern, the lower wall, the long bank road, the broken crossing: none had kept her on the side of the river where he had decided she should be.
"Shall we continue the pursuit, Majesty?" Igor asked. "If Bisera escapes to lead them, they may return in the autumn."
"True. But if that was what I think it was, pursuit would be futile."
He had spent an afternoon with men now being laid out in rows beneath the gatehouse, trying to take Bisera alive. She was alive, but not taken.
"Majesty," Igor said at last, looking toward the empty height. "Was that … an artificial storm?"
"Yes, produced through external mana channeling. if I am right."
"I did not know it was possible on that scale."
"Before today, I had only read descriptions in a few old books in the library. Possible in theory. But to see it…" Alexander fell silent.
But questions lingered in his mind. Why had the person chosen to interfere only at the last moment if she served Vakeria? Did the Vakerian Emperor sent her to retrieve Bisera? Or was her allegiance to Vakeria at all?
He left the questions unspoken. Igor did not press.