‘He looks like a frog,’ she said flatly.Frog whimpered and shuffled on her shoulder, not pleased with the turn this discussion had taken.‘I was a very literal child.And somewhat stubborn.’
Colm burst out laughing.‘Ah, Fola,’ he said, setting the arrow to his bow.‘Never change.’
Her embarrassment took on a new, warmer dimension.One that confounded her, but which she would not have the time to puzzle over.
Another horn blast sounded from the city.The banners of the attacking army—red, yellow, blue and mauve—spread out before the city gates.
‘Ifan gave orders for the city to surrender,’ the captain of the archers said—a reassurance to himself and his men.Fola wondered how many of them had lovers, children, friends or parents still in those distant houses.‘They’ll let the young and infirm leave now, to escape the fighting in the streets.They’re still the prince’s subjects, after all.’
‘As were you, until today,’ Colm observed.
The captain scowled.‘They won’t have taken up arms.’
‘Can you say for sure that none in the city lent aid to the rebels of the Greenwood?’Colm asked.‘Owyn may hold them all complicit.’
The captain was silent.His face fell.
‘Owyn isn’t cruel,’ Fola insisted, though she had had only two meetings with the lad.‘He’ll let them go.’
Colm only grunted.
Fola took a deep breath, steadying herself.The air was brisk, full of the rich scents of autumn.Earth, crushed leaves, rain, the first tinge of decay.Fear and sweat.
The day progressed.
The gates of the city were opened.There was some activity—movement of people.From the tower, it might have been an exodus of non-combatants.It might have been something else.Speculation passed among the archers, until their captain demanded silence.Orders might be shouted or blown by trumpet at any time.
At the noon hour, the fires began.
Timber-framed houses went up like torches.Shingled roofs gouted flame, and then collapsed.The roar of the burning reached them, muted by distance.No less terrible.
‘A good sign, I think,’ Colm said.‘If they did not intend to let the common folk live, they would have put the city to the torch the moment they were through the gates.’
But it did mean Owyn had no more interest in talk.Now, Glascoed would burn, blood would flow, and another legion of the dead would join in Ynyr’s haunting.
Trumpet blasts sounded through the smoke.The captain shouted a brisk order.His men took their positions at the crenellations, their arrows nocked, ready to draw.Colm stood beside them, the wry smile replaced with a hard readiness that Fola scarcely recognised.
Her hands were trembling.She tried to still them.If she drew the wrong line, the wrong rune, the spells she had prepared would fail—or worse, land among Glascoed’s defenders.
What would Arno say?she wondered absently, as the flames grew nearer, the smoke thicker.An image of the archivist came to mind, shaking his hairless head, rolling his eyes, telling her she had grown far, far too involved.
An easy perspective to take from an office above the Labyrinthine Library, secluded from the wider world.She was here, now, with the smoke stinging her eyes and plenty of reasons to fight.To win Siwan’s trust, and bring her back to the City in triumph.To help the people of the Greenwood, who deserved a life lived on their own terms, and the ghosts of their ancestors, who deserved justice.To save her own bloody hide—the most direct and needful of reasons, as she caught flashes of armoured forms moving through the city streets towards the gate of the outer palisade wall.So close, now.Not yet close enough.
Calbog’s contraption groaned and Colm’s bow snapped, a sound that made Fola jump.His arrow carved through smoke.Through the billowing dark, Fola watched the shot smash through a column of spearmen, skewering three bodies like chunks of meat over a cooking fire.Screams sounded, chilling her blood.Colm grunted in satisfaction and reached for another arrow.
Lights burst from the square before the palisade wall, red and yellow flares against the billowing smoke.A series of sharp cracks rolled like thunder.
‘Forgardian hand-cannoneers,’ the captain of the archers said, then spat in distaste.He pointed towards the origin of the sound and the flaring lights.‘Nock!Draw!Loose!’
Twelve arrows arced over the walls and fell.There were screams, but there were always screams now.Fola squinted against the stinging in her eyes, but could see nothing that spoke to the success of the archers’ volley, even as the captain bellowed orders and they fired another.
Is all battle like this?A blind, violent flailing in the smoke and fog?
Another sudden flare, roll of thunder, and now the splintering of wood, and the gate of the palisade fell.Fighters, some with tabards spattered in blood, surged through the opening.Arrows fell in a constant stream from the curtain wall and its towers; the captain gave no more orders, only launched arrows alongside his men into the onrushing mass.Colm’s arrows fell, too, each one pinning a handful of unfortunate souls to the earth.
The chill that gripped Fola deepened, and she felt a certainty that Glascoed would lose the day.
‘Whatever you mean to do, you’d best do it,’ Colm said, launching another arrow.It found the neck of a slight figure in loose-fitting armour—a youth, little more than a girl or a boy, in the mauve and yellow of Afondir.The man-at-arms behind the youth fell with its head pinned to his thigh.
