Текст книги "Fortress of Eagles"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Then, officers’ shouts notwithstanding, and with a last, sporadic volley of arrows, the shadows of the yard gave up more and more bowmen who otherwise would have remained concealed, archers joining their sword-and-shield men in retreat until nigh on two hundred men were in sporadic, uncertain rout, giving ground across the yard, past the corner of the building and across its face, running until the rebels’ right flank was against the broad South Stairs and their left was toward the South Gate, all of it so fast-moving that their archers had found no place to stand.

Tristen forged ahead, giving the rebels no space to breathe. At the rebels’ backs was a second curtain wall, the east, its small single gate shut. But the fortress itself offered nearer refuge to men hard-pressed, and the rebel earl’s men pushed and shoved one another atop the South Stairs as they opened the doors to the interior, and men poured in, seeking shelter in the Zeide’s inner halls and the warren of stairs and corridors inside.

He had far rather the retreat had gone to the east, farthermost small gate of the South Court. He had left them that retreat in hope of their fleeing through the second of the two curtain-wall gates into the East Court. But the rebel officer was drawing his men into a warren of stairs and rooms, where traps might be prepared and where he might have something in mind.

But king’s men held the South Court and the West, undisputed.

“Open the all the gates! Open the South andthe East Gates!” Tristen pointed with his sword for the sake of the Guelenmen, some of whom did not know the East Gate from the one at their backs. “Let Captain Anwyll in by the South! And open up the East!”

“Get both the gates, lads! Go let in Cossell!” Uwen relayed the order in terms the men knew in a voice that echoed off the walls, as their band engaged the last escaping earl’s men on the lower tiers of the South Stairs, the scene of processionals and ceremonies.

“Forward!” Tristen shouted, and kept pressing up the steps as the rebels inside heaved at the great doors to shut them at the backs of their own hindmost men. Resistance collapsed, men went down, and the last few to reach the other side of the doors tried to push them shut in their faces, but Tristen hewed at the defenders with all his might through the narrowing gap, and Uwen pushed, and more of their men pressed forward and added their weight. The doors gave back and back until courage failed the rebels and the doors gave in a sudden lack of force behind them. They forced jammed doors the rest of the way open, shoving bodies before them and treading over dead and wounded as they reached the dark hall, seeking the enemy.

Then men poured in at their flank, out of the dark. “King’s men!” Tristen shouted, and “King’s men!” the shout went up on either side, Guelenmen narrowly evading each others’ mistaken attack as the viceroy’s force came in from the west wing to join theirs.

“They’ve gone east!” he heard Uwen shout. “M’lord, rebels is to the Temple court!”

“Dragons with me!” Tristen shouted, and turned his own men toward the deep dark, past the junction of stairs, chasing the distant noise of retreat in a thunderous advance of their own, all the way past what must be the great hall. The retreat echoed differently then, and his ears told him the rebels had reached the end of the hall and the downward stairs to the East Court. “Shields!” he shouted, as they came rushing up. “Stairs to the right!”

Men met them out of the blind dark, rear guard for the men on the stairs, and for a brief, sharp encounter everything was blind, men striking at men they could not see, pushing resisting men down steps and against the upward push of bodies. Tristen struck few blows himself, pushed with his shield, hit with the flat of his blade, his footing unsteady on unseen steps and fallen men entangling the feet of the living. The halls and stairwell rang with shouts and the clash of arms, and the battle anger was so close, so very close he dared not charge headlong. He pushed as much as fought, used his shield, forced the rebels down the narrow stairs to the door he knew was there. He heard Uwen’s voice. He heard the rebels shouting, “Lord Sihhë!” this time in panic, men pressing ahead at the last by sheer weight.

The earl’s men tried to stand. There was no room. Then a seam of night sky broke behind the heads of the defenders, and widened, as someone opened the east door. A few escaped outward, and now the battle choked into another panic as men jammed the doors to the outside in utter disorder.

Men with more presence of mind tried to rally once more through and shut that door against Tristen’s force, a door which Tristen was equally determined should stand open. He battered them with his shield, pressed back, trampled on the fallen, a moment of extreme peril, and the door, by reason of men fallen in the gap, could not shut again. He reached the open air of the steps, facing the shrines, and a knot of rebels who had run headlong against a fatal wall of Dragon Guard waiting for them, a grim line with shields locked.

Anwyll and Cossell had both come in.

The hammering din of battle and the shouts of armed men spreading out from the doors behind him fell away to a growing, knife-edged silence. A band of maybe sixscore rebels was left standing, half as many more wounded huddled at their feet. He had no doubt that some of the earl’s men had disappeared inside, to lose themselves in the halls. The columned shrines and tombs that towered up on either hand of this small courtyard might have sheltered the rebels: the Bryaltine, the Quinaltine, the Teranthine shrines, next the crypts of holy men and Aswyddim were a maze of narrow aisles. The roofs of the fortress itself might have been to fear, but no attack had come from that direction.

And Cossell had shut the gate again at his back, keeping that way barred from all comers. That wall of Dragon Guard shields was absolute and unyielding.

The silence grew as even smaller movements stopped, throughout, attackers and defenders alike.

CHAPTER 6

Where is Earl Edwyll?” Tristen asked the earl’s men from atop the steps. His voice echoed in the quiet of the yard, and he looked on men who could do nothing other than what their lord bade them. He settled no blame there. He was, among other matters, anxious to see the officer who had managed the defense, who, if he had had battle-hardened men, would have made matters far worse than he had. “Who stands for these men?”

There was some little hesitation, and then swords slanted down disconsolately. But one young man grounded his shield forward of the others, took off his helm one-handed and cast him a defiant look. “Crissand Adiran, thane of Tas Aden, son of Edwyll son of Crissand, son of Edwylls before there ever were Aswyddim in Henas’amef! Istand for my father’s men, of the house of Meiden! ”

A strange feeling went through Tristen’s heart then, as if he had heard a spell uttered in the words, in the names, in the Unfolding of a history he might, at some time, in a life before this life, have known, in the titles of a young man who had for a time stood successfully against him.

“And why do you oppose me?” he asked this defiant young man. And that, too, he seemed to remember saying.

There was quiet, in which the flame of torches thumped and a step grated on stone, and men on every hand, fresh from their exertions and in danger still, breathed deep and hard.

“For justice,” the young thane said. “For justice!”

He said then the third thing it seemed he had once said:

“And do you think I shall not be a just lord?”

Again the silence, in which a man of his own company coughed, a dry, exhausted sound, as of a man who had been running. From the South Court was a distant tumult that sounded as if the townsfolk might be at the gates, no further. Here the young thane faced him in stony silence.

“What would you say justice should be?” Tristen asked in that hush.

“Pardon for them,” the young thane said, with a haughty nod toward the men behind him. But an older man moved forward then, with a clatter of metal and a heavy step. “No, m’lord,” the man said, “none of that for me. I stand with my lord the earl and with my lord’s son.”

Tristen thought of Uwen, seeing that man, a soldier, who would not leave the earl’s son to save his life. Other men moved then, four of them, the earl’s men, standing with the young man, defying him and his offer of justice. In the same moment and with no animosity at all, Uwen moved a little closer to him, and had his shield up and his sword ready for any attack.

Another man joined the five, and then another, all expecting to die, Tristen thought, and every man in the lot surely yearning to join them, and every man else in the courtyard either glad he had no such choice to make or envying the courage they saw.

“I pardon you,” Tristen said. “I pardon you all.”

“M’lord,” Uwen said under his breath, “don’t let ’em free, not that easy.”

“And I forgive the earl, if he will swear to me.” He knew it set him against the viceroy’s opinion, and perhaps against the law, but he had no desire to harm such men as the young thane and the men who defended him. “And provided he has not harmed the king’s messenger.”

“We have the king’s herald a prisoner,” the young thane said, with this time a small tremor in his voice and a fear in his eyes… or it was the uncertain torchlight and the bitter wind. “We have not harmed him. And I will wait to see what this promise is worth.”

“This is a dangerous young man.” It was Anwyll who stood just behind: Tristen knew the voice. “Lewen’s-son’s advice is also the law. Do not release these men, Your Grace. You must not.”

“I have already given my promise,” Tristen said. “And the king will regard it.”

Again a silence, and slowly the young man let down his sword, as he had already let down the shield.

“What my father wills,” Crissand said. “That I will, with my men, so you keep your word, sir.”

“Where is your father?”

Crissand cast a glance up the height of the Zeide itself, and that seemed his answer.

“Have them all lay down their weapons, Your Grace,” Anwyll said. “I beg you don’t offer any more assurances.”

He had no need of Anwyll’s advice at the moment. He wished Anwyll silent, but:

“Do as he asks,” Crissand said to his men, and slowly the ranks came and cast down their weapons, a clang of iron and a thump of shields cast one onto the other. Crissand added his own, among the last.

“Lusin,” Uwen said quietly, “His Grace will have that young man handled wi’ due respect, and the seven of them”—Uwen surely meant the men who had joined the thane—“under special guard. —Ye’re on m’lord’s word, young lord. Ye come up here.”

The seven were not willing, but the young man cast a forbidding glance and went of his own accord as far as the steps.

“Your lordship,” Crissand said. “I rest on your word, I and the men with me, and my father, sir, I ask that.”

“And where is the king’s messenger?”

“In the Aswydds’ apartment. With my father.”

To have taken that set of rooms was entirely understandable in a man who claimed the Aswydds’ place and titles. It was equally within Tristen’s understanding that he could not permit that situation to go on, whether or not it mattered a whit to him: it mattered greatly to Cefwyn and it certainly mattered to the Amefin earls. Edwyll was the nearest kin to the Aswydds Cefwyn had allowed to remain in Henas’amef when he exiled Lady Orien and her sister, and that mercy was now repaid by a gesture every Amefin understood. More, removing the earl with any force would entail damage that itself was significant to the Amefin.

And removing him even by persuasion and the good offices of the man’s son would entail going into that place and claiming it for the night, when he had as lief camp in the courtyard tonight, or sleep in the stables, rather than that cursed premises. He wished he had a choice, and he wanted nothing more now than to sit down where he stood.

“Let him come out with no harm and we will settle all the rest by daylight.”

“I will go up and try to persuade him, by your leave,” the young thane said, much as if it were something he had tried before, even many times, to no avail, and so saying, Crissand looked suddenly overwhelmed, more than he had when faced with weapons. “Or my father’s men might, where I cannot. Let them speak to him, sir, on your good word.”

The men Crissand proposed were the seven men Uwen had ordered under special guard, he well guessed. And they were not the men he would set free with the earl in reach.

But he had promised, and no good came of breaking his word at the outset.

“You will try. Come with me. We shall both try. Bring a torch.”

“Your Grace,” Anwyll began as he reached the uppermost step, and he found himself very weary of hearing those words in that tone of voice. “Your Grace,” Anwyll persisted. “These men haveno pardon. I must urge your lordship—”

“Am I duke of Amefel?” he asked shortly, “And did not Lord Heryn do as he pleased in his own hall?”

“Far too much,” Anwyll said on a breath. “And died for it, Your Grace.”

He knew that it was heart-sent advice. Anwyll had done nothing amiss and a great deal right, and faced him with dogged courage and no ill will.

“I hear all you say,” he said, the two of them paused, he on the upper step. “And I take it much to heart, sir. But I will pardon them, all the same. Take them and these other men under guard and under my protection and hold them some safe place elsewhere. How does it stand in the South Court?”

“The gates are shut,” Anwyll said. “The town has turned out in the street, Your Grace, with knives and staves, all shouting for your lordship, but we dare not let the mob in.”

He could hear the uproar past the throbbing in his ears—heard it now beginning beyond the East Gate, in that blind and little-used street that tucked up between storehouses and Zeide defenses. The aid the town offered was dangerous, and he needed none of it now.

But the town also had need of reassurances. He strode down the steps, his personal guard hastening to overtake him, and went past the heap of weapons, into the columned end of the courtyard. At the gatehouse and its first defenses, three of Cossell’s men had stayed and gotten the oaken gate shut again.

“Open the inner gate,” he said, and they raised the bar and dragged the oak doors back.

Townspeople pressed at the bars beyond the portcullis, a mob with the hazard of torches, and bearing all manner of weapons. But seeing him, they began to shout, “Lord Sihhë!”

He lifted his sword, and gained a silence enough to speak. “The earl’s men have surrendered and I have taken them under my protection—do no harm! Hear me! Do no harm! Tell it through the town!”

“ Lord Sihhë!” the answer came in jubilation—and he walked back through the East Court as he had come, leaving the gates open for the crowd to witness through the bars whatever might befall here.

“Take these men to safekeeping,” he ordered Anwyll regarding the prisoners. “Uwen! Bring the thane with us. And bear a light inside. Five men with us, to persuade the earl to surrender and end this.”

“Lights,” Uwen called out as he climbed the steps and men opened the doors into darkness. “Light, there, on the duke’s order! ”

Then: “Bring a light here!” he heard soldiers echo inside, up the short stairs and down the hall.

He went in, up dark and bloody steps, past moaning wounded, with men treading cautiously beside him, until he reached the level of the main hall and a crazily spreading firelight along the ceiling. From the far other end of the corridor a man came carrying a torch.

Illumination flared erratically along a hallway littered with wounded and dead, shone on polished floors, on ornate carvings. “Light the hall!” he heard men still shouting to the farthest doors as they trod a crooked course among the dead. The light-bearer reached them, then guided them to the center of the building.

“Come with us,” Tristen said to the man with the torch, and started up the left-hand stairs, with Uwen, with his guards, with Crissand. He had his shield, and Uwen carried his own, but his guards, who had had the banners, had their hands unencumbered, and Sergeant Gedd took the idea to snatch a stub of a candle from its holder and borrow fire from the torch-bearer. Then Gedd went ahead, enterprisingly setting light to at least one candle in every sconce, all the way to the upper floor, making the steps more visible, bringing a wan, ordinary light to the heart of the Zeide.

But from above another source of light spread along the ceiling, and that proved to be a torch in the hallway, where three men of the viceroy’s Guelen Guard besieged the door of the Aswydds’ old apartment.

“Your Grace,” their sergeant said, recognizing him, “we’ve sent for axes.”

“No, sir. By no means.” He was appalled. They were beautiful doors, carved and very heavy. “Not yet. —Have you spoken with the earl? And has he answered at all?”

“His servants answer, your lordship, and won’t open for our asking.”

That was no surprise. He beckoned the young thane forward, among the viceroy’s guard and his own. Crissand rapped uncertainly at the door.

“Father? Father? Do you hear me? Answer.” Crissand rapped harder. “Father? I need your advice, sir. Please.”

There was no response.

Uwen rapped the door with his sword hilt, no gentle tap. “You mayn’t stay there, your lordship. Open. Your son is asking. Soon it may be others wi’ less goodwill.”

There was no sound at all within.

“This is His Grace Tristen of Ynefel asking!” Uwen shouted this time. “His Grace has brought your son in his safekeepin’, and your son is asking ye kindly to open an’ surrender the king’s messenger, your lordship, which would be very wise to do, before His Grace’s patience runs out, an’ afore we spoil these fine doors. Ye come out, now!”

There was still no answer, but more, no sound within the apartment.

“Could they have gotten out beforehand?” Uwen asked.

“Not by us,” the viceroy’s men said.

Tristen knew the place. The same as most rooms of the Zeide, its windows had only a small vent, and if the earl and his men damaged them to get out that way, they were on the second floor above pavings and the courtyards occupied by king’s men. It was possible that they had escaped down the stairs into the dark before the fighting, but if that were the case, the earl and his company might be lying among the dead downstairs, or they might be anywhere in the upper floors.

Most urgently, there was the king’s messenger to account for.

Uwen thumped the door with his gloved fist, a frown on his face. “Now’s certainly a finer time to come out than tomorrow, your lordship, and it won’t get better. His Grace is patient, now. And your son is anxious for ye, wi’ increasin’ good cause.”

Still there was no answer.

“Open the door,” Tristen said. The question of Lord Edwyll’s fate had become more important than the fine doors, and one of the viceroy’s men had by now brought up an axe from a martial display down the hall.

“Father!” Crissand shouted out loudly, leaning against the door. “Will you not answer your son?”

There was still no response. Tristen gave the signal and the garrison soldier plied the axe, wonderful dark carving reduced to chips about the lock, and with a widening gap between the latch and the frame.

It was wrong, Tristen was increasingly convinced, remembering Lady Orien, who with her sister had had these rooms after her brother. It was all wrong. They would find nothing friendly in this room. And if not friendly, they had best not have the young thane loose in their midst.

“Sergeant,” he said to the viceroy’s man in charge, and quietly, as the blows continued and the chips flew, “move the young lord away.”

“No,” Crissand said, but the sergeant’s men laid hands on him, and moved him firmly back.

In that same moment the axe had cleared enough wood from the edge for a sword to lift the bolt, and the soldiers shouldered in an armored rush into a dim, narrow foyer leading to a well-lit room.

Men lay all about that room, dead, down to the man tied with ropes to a chair, near the tall, green-draped windows.

Tristen stood still, surrounded by the green-velvet drapery and the rich bronze-and-gold furnishings of Lady Orien’s residence… and the ill feeling in the room was stifling. He had not tried the gray space, until now—and it was cold, and ominous. He let down his shield, let it stand against the side of a chair, but he did not let down his defense against the insubstantial hazards he felt.

There began to be an argument outside, passionate and suddenly loud. “No, Your Honor!” someone said, and Crissand reached the foyer in his struggle, stopped as Lusin allowed him no further progress.

“Where is my father?” Crissand cried.

“Dead,” Tristen said. “Dead, I fear, every one of them. —Let him go.”

Lusin released him, and in a sudden rush Crissand went through the apartment searching. They followed as far as the bedroom that had been Lady Orien’s, and there they found Crissand on his knees by the bed, where an old man lay atop the bedclothes, fully clothed, but composed, unlike the others.

“The earl died first,” one of the viceroy’s Guelens surmised. “An’ they followed.”

“This ain’t a young man to loose in the town tonight,” Uwen said, moving close to Tristen’s side, speaking to him with his back to the young man and quietly. “I ask ye, m’lord, send the lad wi’ these lads down to the guardroom an’ put a watch on him, or he’ll do someone hurt, hisself an’ his own men like as any.”

He knew the guardroom and abhorred the thought. But he regarded Uwen’s advice when he regarded no other, and the feeling in the air was disquieting, unsettling to reason.

“Take him to the guardroom,” Tristen said. “For your own safety, sir. I ask you go with them.”

Crissand made no resistance being gathered up in the hands of the guards, but caught Tristen’s eye with a white, shocked stare as he passed, as if asking for what reasonable cause all this had happened… as Tristen asked himself the same question. He had attempted kindness and charity; and disregarded the advice of knowledgeable men, and all this was the issue of it: the king’s messenger, the earl, his servants, all dead, young Crissand stricken with a bitter, unsettling grief, and the harm that he had felt likely in all this journey was real. The earl was dead on the green-velvet coverlet of the bed. The man in the chair in the first room was the king’s messenger, bound to that chair, dead by what cause was not evident. The earl’s men were all dead, five of them, scattered about the place, three near the heavy sideboard.

“Ain’t no mark,” Uwen said, pushing a dead man with his foot. “Poison, I’d guess.” Uwen’s guess was plainly practical, while the gray space roiled with unease.

Then Lusin lifted a cup from among two cups and a pitcher on the table, and turned it sideways.

A red drop spilled out.

“Drunk from,” Lusin said.

There were half a dozen cups in all, some on small tables about the room.

“All these, used,” Tawwys said, examining another near where he stood. “M’lord, all drunk from.”

Servants such as these seemed to be did not drink with their lord on any ordinary occasion. And the king’s messenger as well… had he drunk wine, bound to a chair, with the fighting raging downstairs?

Folly. Outright folly, and villainy. The other earls had hung back to know the issue of it—then disavowed Edwyll altogether. Perhaps he had committed himself to rebellion even before he had ever intercepted the king’s message… but coincidence still smelled of wizardry at the least.

And the wine service… and the death of a messenger, whose person was sacrosanct, even between warring factions…

“Lady Orien’s cups,” he said aloud, and knew it was not alone Lady Orien’s cups… but Lady Orien’s wards: the Zeide servants had sealed the place after Orien’s banishment, after the king returned from Lewenbrook. The rooms had been two months unopened, until the earl moved in.

No few of the men blessed themselves, Uwen halfway so, and then Uwen abandoned the gesture, as Uwen at last renounced such protections in despair.

“Lady Orien’s wine,” Uwen said. “Well, her ladyship hardly had time to pack, did she?”

Not packed, indeed. All about them was the opulence of the Aswydds, the dark green velvet, the brazen dragons that upheld massive candles, the dragon-legged tables and the eagles that, paired wings almost touching, overshadowed even the velvet-covered bed in the other room, where the earl lay.

The messenger sat bound to his ornately carved chair, alone incapable of drinking.

But there was wine stain on the man’s blond beard and on the Marhanen scarlet of his tunic, details apparent, Tristen found, once one walked over to have a closer look. The earl’s servants, their lord dead of poison, the citadel falling, had all drunk from the cups and forced the messenger to drink, too, men not bound by the understandings of earls and dukes. Anger was in this room; uncleansed, untenanted, haunted by Aswydd hate, and the earl the remote kin of the Aswydds: he had been drawn in, drawn down, if he had had the smallest portion of the Aswydd gift. Tristen felt the tug of it himself, and dismissed it, with force.

Then he could draw a whole breath.

“Take them wherever they take the dead,” he said. “Do whatever you judge fit, Uwen.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Uwen said. And then a hesitation. “There’s some as would say burn the rebels’ bodies. Ye want that, m’lord, or buryin’ ’em, like honest men?”

“Do what should be done,” he said again, at the moment lost as to what that was, or what he had the power to do to mend his arrival here. At the moment he ceded all power of decision to Uwen.

Burials. Burning. Neither destroyed the shadows, and Althalen, where all had burned, was most haunted of all. He only clung to the necessity of moderation in himself. Wide, inconsiderate action, Emuin as well as Mauryl had informed him, led to bruises. And worse.

Worst of all, he cast his own responsibility on Uwen, who could not see into the danger in this place—or know the danger of a strong spirit given Place on the earth.

“Bury them,” he decided for himself. “The earl, the servants, all the men who died. Let priests say words, Uwen, whatever they like.”

He had heard running steps in the hall, and heard them approaching the door. Men had lately been in haste, and might still be. He took no alarm even as a breathless man of the Dragons pushed his way past objecting guards; but the expression, the pallor, the distress in the man foretold worse yet.

“Your Grace.” The man was one of Anwyll’s men, but both Uwen and Lusin held him from coming closer in his agitation. “The captain’s respects—the lord viceroy is killing the prisoners.”

Lightning might have struck. It was like that, throwing into clarity all a dark landscape of Amefin resentments, Guelen angers, potent as the ill that gathered in this room.

“Where?” was his first conscious thought, and the man began to say, “The South Court.”

Tristen pushed the man, Lusin, all his guards, aside.

“M’lord!” he heard Uwen call out, heard Uwen shout orders to some men to stay, some to come with them. Tristen gathered up his shield as he went out into the hall, and stayed for nothing else. He began to run, down the hall, down the stairs, and his men chased him with thumping of shields and the rattle of armor and weapons, down to the vacant center hall and the partially restored candlelight.

Beyond the open doors, torchlight shone in the South Court. He ran out onto the landing, saw a confused straggle of guards, Dragons, standing at the bottom, not opposing them as he came down the steps with his men, rather looking for orders, while a dark wall of red-coated men clustered near torchlight in the center of the yard and screams of threat and dying echoed off the walls beyond.

Death, death above, and death here below… death proceeding methodically, with the rise and fall of swords against unarmed men, death with outcries of anger and fear, death in a mass of men engaged in killing each other at the last curtain wall.

“Shields!” Tristen called out, and, without mercy: “ Swords!” as they came up on that dark knot of shadows, Guelen Guard penning Amefin against the corner and cutting them down. A few Amefin had swords. Only a few.

“Dragon Guard!” Uwen roared out in a voice that echoed off the walls. “Guelens! Stand aside! Stand back! Come to order, here! Way for His Grace, damn ye! Down weapons!”

Men turned stark-faced from the killing, men drew back at a sergeant’s profane voice, except the last handful, gone mad with slaughter, and them Tristen hit with both shield and sword, battering them aside. In the distance Anwyll shouted, “Pull back, pull back for a captain of the Guard!” but Tristen thought only of breaking through the ranks in front of him, overwhelming anyone who resisted him, until the killing stopped.

“Way for His Grace!” Uwen shouted, and at last, again, Anwyll’s voice near at hand. “Draw back, draw back!”

Then other voices, many voices, the sergeants: “Stand aside, stand back there, lads!”

Quiet descended, except the drawing of breath, the moans of the wounded.

Tristen found himself with a strewed mass of bodies at his feet, an area fringed by armed guardsmen… them, and a small surviving knot of earl’s men in the corner of the wall: Crissand, the seven, and a handful more.

Slaughter, plain and thorough, Guelen Guard against unarmed Amefin prisoners.

For a moment he could only think of adding to it anyone who opposed him, and it was perilous, very perilous, for Uwen to come up beside him, but Uwen did, a shadow in a wind that blew out of the Edge of the gray place. He was there, on the very brink of death, and he was here, his hands clenched on leather and iron, his body insensible to pain, the wind in his nostrils cold and burning his chest.

“M’lord,” Uwen said quietly, the only voice in all the world. “M’lord, I’m right by ye. So’s Lusin and the lads. We’re with ye.”