Part 1
The stylus had gone through the wax.
Bisera looked down at the pale scratch in the wood beneath it. She had pressed too hard when the tower fell. Around her, dust sifted from the broken roofs, men spat grit, and the last great stones of Podem's southeastern corner settled into the chamber that had eaten their foundations.
She lifted the stylus. There were three hundred men to account for.
Three tablets lay on an overturned crate. Positions on the first. Releases on the second. Losses on the third.
"General."
Vesmir was watching the breach. Through the thinning dust, a golden eagle rose, dipped violently, and vanished. A second took its place. The first Gillyrians were coming over the rubble.
"I see them."
The breach was not a doorway. Men climbed it with their shields above their heads and their free hands searching for anything that would hold. One disappeared to the waist between two slabs. The man behind caught his wrist; the man behind that struck him in the back, unable to stop. For a moment all three remained tangled beneath the eagle.
Then the standard moved again.
Alexander had stopped his engines before sending his men forward. No new missiles crossed the paling sky. Under tall shields, engineers followed the leading files and planted white-bound poles in two rough tracks through the ruin. The heads of his four assault columns came in succession; the rest waited outside, an army reduced to the number of boots the broken corner would bear.
For now. Bisera's retrenchment waited little more than a hundred long paces inside the fallen wall. Between it and the breach lay the abandoned shell of the lower city: roofless workshops, old courts, smoke streaming across stones that had outlasted the men who first raised them.
Behind her, the inhabited streets climbed toward the upper circuit. Not far enough.
She could have walked from the broken corner to the southern upper gate before a leisurely man finished breakfast. Today she intended to make Alexander spend the morning doing it.
"Darik."
The captain turned from the left-hand barricade. He had wrapped a strip of dark wool around his sword hand to stop the split knuckles opening. She remembered him as a thin young soldier. Fifteen years had thickened his waist and left the expression unchanged.
"When the left roof goes, you come back."
"It is a good roof."
"It is half a roof."
"The useful half."
Vesmir made a noise in his throat.
Darik went back to his men. She watched him touch two shoulders, adjust a boy's shield, and take his place beside the chained wagons.
Saralta's additional sixty were farther uphill, a separate mounted reserve beneath the southern upper approach. The princess's standard was across the river with Otchigin's two hundred. The rest of the army belonged to the two withdrawal streams: the bridge for wheels and the Braids for the thousands still feeding into cold water.
These three hundred belonged to the time between.
A ward officer ducked behind the crate. "Six precincts shut and counted. Seven names short of the last rolls. Elders have checked twice."
Bisera looked at the three hundred men between her and the breach. None could go house to house now. "Leave the names with the ward elders. Keep a door watch for late arrivals."
The first Gillyrian shield struck the barricade.
The work shuddered but held. Overturned wagons, timber frames, and doors packed with earth bent across the surviving lanes. Old masonry closed the ends. Above the narrow approaches, men crouched behind roof edges with baskets of torn-up paving.
"Wait," Bisera said.
A second shield appeared. A third. The first soldier tried to plant his foot against the lower timber. The paving shifted beneath him. Water had frozen between stones lifted and loosely reset during the night, and the sole of his boot slid sideways.
"Now."
The paving came down.
Not the boulders of songs. Ugly pieces of street that broke fingers, split shields, and knocked men into the files behind them. A Gillyrian pushed through the falling stone far enough to catch the top of a wagon. Darik struck his wrist with the butt of a spear. The man fell backward, shouting curses.
She moved toward the right-hand gap before the shouting ended.
For nearly an hour, the defense worked.
Bisera almost forgot it was just a delay tactic.
Bisera lent her voice where the horns disappeared beneath the fighting and her sword where the timber shook. At the chained wagons, an axle spike began to pull loose. Two men drove it down again while a third held a shield over their bent backs. On a broken wall, a slinger lost three fingers and tried to pick up another stone with the hand that remained.
"Below," Bisera told him.
"I can still—"
"You can still walk. Use it."
The man obeyed. She sent another into his place.
A gust brought the smell of singed flour from a store beyond the wall. Her stomach contracted so hard that she mistook it for a wound. For an instant she was in James's kitchen, listening to butter hiss while he insisted on personally cooking for her. Then a shield hit the timber, and the image was gone.
The first Gillyrian files could see the defenders. The men behind could see only the standards ahead of them stop. Fresh companies reached the same narrow approaches, discovered the same ice, and paid to learn what the companies before them already knew. But they learned.
A shield roof advanced over the worst footing. Archers found the places where her men leaned out to drop stones. A Gillyrian officer stopped shouting at the barricade and began looking at the rear courtyard beside it. Bisera saw him point.
A runner reached her with ice whitening his boots.
"The river?"
"Two lanes working when I left. First wards across. The queue was still in the eastern streets."
"How long ago?"
He swallowed. "Long enough for this to be old news, General."
Honest boy. She wished honesty could shorten a road.
"Drink. Then take the next message north."
He was still fumbling for his flask when another runner came under the covered walk.
"The house on the left. They're through the rear court."
Darik's useful half-roof was no longer useful.
"Three volleys and out," Bisera said. "By file. Drop the beam."
"General, we can hold them there. We could kill hundreds."
"And lose our men with it? No unnecessary deaths, and the last of the ward has yet to cross the river. Give the order."
Three volleys crossed the barricade. Darik pulled his men through the alley. Two axes cut a rope. Wedges tore free. The corner house came down behind them, tile and rubble striking the lane with a violence that brought a brief, stupid cheer from a young defender.
Then someone asked where his brother was, and the cheer stopped.
Bisera withdrew her men in succession through the openings left in their own work. For a moment she looked toward the upper stone and wanted to send everyone into it. There was room enough on the Three Hills: streets, yards, the upper circuit, and the citadel beyond. Room was not grain. Behind those gates the field army would become a starving garrison, with no relief she could count upon and nearly seven thousand civilians trapped below between the two forces.
Sixty fit men went north while the eastern lower-city route remained open, escorting the wounded and reinforcing the landward guards along the bank. They were to hold until Marcus brought out the city's final detachment. Release was another assignment, not permission to vanish.
She marked sixty on the second tablet. The third required longer.
When the last shield file came away, casualties and evacuations had left her two hundred infantry. Vesmir took the leading groups toward the next barricades. Bisera followed the rear through the inhabited streets, then climbed above the southern upper gate and set her tablets on the wall-walk.
A runner pressed his flask into her hand.
She tried to refuse. Her first word came out scraped and thin.
"Drink, General. I cannot carry a message you cannot say."
She drank. Below her, the Gillyrians crossed the abandoned retrenchment.
Part 2
"I have brought an army to a place where it cannot be an army."
Alexander said it quietly.
The emperor stood at the inner spoil bank southeast of the breach. His pavilion and great standard remained on the detached rise to the southwest; the small command pennon here snapped over heads grey with masonry dust. He had moved no farther. Men still fell between the slabs, and a stretcher coming out could stop a whole file trying to go in.
"The first position is ours," Igor said.
"And how many men could use their swords to take it?"
Igor did not answer.
A wounded soldier was being carried over the nearer track. His shield had been split down its painted face. One of the bearers stepped wrong, recovered, and cursed with the helpless fury of a man who could not put down his burden to strike the thing hurting him.
Alexander watched until they reached firm ground.
"The halt remains," he told the waiting captain. "Siphons back. Sand, earth, hooks, wet hides. I need streets and stores, not ashes. Get me Theophilus."
The captain ran. Theophilus arrived with dust caught in the folds beside his nose and both sleeves grey to the elbows.
"The broad paving brought us inside," Alexander said. "Now every approach narrows. Only handfuls can fight while the rest wait behind them. What is in the siege train that I am not using?"
Theophilus looked toward the roofs beyond the broken corner.
"Two hundred iron-headed picks."
Alexander waited.
"The poorer houses are timber and wattle. Rear courts share low walls. Storerooms are divided by weak rubble. Give my crews a hundred picks and the Palace Shield to hold each opening."
He crouched and drew two crooked lines in the dirt with a piece of broken tile. Across them he scratched a barricade. Then, through the shapes on either side, he drew another route.
"We do not go down her streets. We go through the kitchens."
Igor's gaze remained on the drawing.
"Those are houses."
"Yes," Alexander said.
Not a rebuke. Not permission to pretend otherwise. Theophilus held the tile still.
"Have the first parties call before they break through," Alexander said. "Any civilian found inside is brought behind our line. No torching to clear a room. No man earns a reward for what he finds in a cupboard."
A cry came from the breach. All three looked up.
Alexander straightened. "The engineers open the houses. The Palace Shield protects them and takes each gap. Bring her soldiers out from behind those barricades."
"Yes, Majesty."
Beyond the lower roofs, the upper circuit stood on the Three Hills, grey and apparently untouched by the morning's ruin.
"Could you do beneath that wall what you did below?"
Theophilus followed his gaze. "Not in the time you want. The corner stood over buried rubble and river clay, where the older southern curtain joined the rebuilt eastern work. The South Ravine hid the final approach. Weight, soft ground, concealment. We had all three." He looked at the heights.
"I cannot give you soft ground beneath living rock."
Igor said, "If she has taken the field army uphill—"
"Then we will run out of time. We will have to burn them out." His voice remained quiet. "There would be little victory in that."
The emperor's voice had not risen. Theophilus lowered his eyes.
A courier arrived from the bridge, his cloak wet to the waist.
"The Vakerians were making a breakout, and our forces were being routed on the north bank," Igor said. "Downstream too. There are movements in the reeds."
Alexander looked past him at the wounded file coming out of the breach.
"Do not empty this front. Use attack-and-retreat tactics on the retreating army rather than direct engagement. The point is to cause maximum attrition to their forces. No detached units chasing them beyond support from our road. Avoid attacks on civilians."
"And if the men in the reeds are soldiers?"
"Their direction and their numbers."
The courier bowed and went. Alexander stood over the lines Theophilus had drawn. Somewhere inside Podem, Bisera was deciding which men she could afford to leave at the next turn. He put his heel through the little barricade. In the tanners' quarter, the picks began to work.
The first interruption came before a second messenger had crossed the breach. A crew had broken a pantry wall and found an old man wedged behind a grain chest, a woman trying to lift him, and a boy holding a kitchen knife in both hands. The Palace Shield had called for them to come out. The boy had said no. The old man could not stand.
"The next crew is waiting behind them," the officer reported. "We can go round, but it puts us back into the lane. Or leave a pair with the family until—"
"Bring them through. Behind our line."
"Majesty, the gap is scarcely wide enough for the chest."
"Then move the chest."
The officer went with the expression of a man carrying an order he would shortly have to defend to somebody under arrows. Alexander watched the opening where the waiting standards should have been moving. A horn inside the city sounded the Vakerian withdrawal. While his men coaxed a kitchen knife out of a child's hands, Bisera was taking another group away from him.
Igor said nothing. He did not have to.
When the family finally appeared beneath the nearer eagle, the woman was still holding the boy by the back of his tunic. Four shieldmen carried the old man on the cupboard door; a pick crew came after them, white with plaster and late for its next opening. The boy's knife had gone. He stared at the emperor as though trying to decide whether this was the man who had broken his house.
Alexander could not spare those minutes.
"The next opening," he said, and the picks began again.
Part 3
Bisera sent a runner who did not return.
The second came back without his shield.
He stumbled through the southern upper gate with blood on his mouth, caught himself against the stair rail, and tried to salute before he had breath enough to speak.
"Leave it," she said. "Tell me."
"They are not in the street, General."
A hammer struck somewhere below. Three deliberate blows, then a crash.
"They are in the houses. Siege picks. Through the rear walls, through the kitchens. Darik found them coming out of a bedroom behind his barricade."
For two heartbeats, she did not move.
Then she looked down at the wax and saw what Alexander had done to it.
Days of work. Cleared alleys, weakened beams, roofs ranged for falling stone. Every clever turn faced down a street. He had stopped using the streets. Of course he had.
She could almost see the moment of understanding in his face. The slight stillness. The impatient hand reaching for an engineer.
"Vesmir. Everything back toward the upper approach. Leave the eastward positions now. Not by tiers. Now."
He took one look at her and went.
She called after him, but the name scraped painfully through her throat. He turned before she could force it out again.
"Darik's lane. First."
He nodded. The next minutes arrived separately, each carried by a man too breathless to make them join.
A rear court lost. A roof position cut off. A group through, another waiting. At the lower turn, a file backed toward the gate with its wounded in the middle and its shields turned outward. Bisera pointed it north before the captain had finished asking.
Then the boy without the shield returned. This time he was not running. She knew before he spoke.
"The beam jammed."
Down by the tanners' block, the rope had been cut. The great timber had shifted a hand's breadth, caught against the wall it was meant to clear, and stopped. Forty-one men had been behind it. The Gillyrians came through the houses on both sides while the trapped file tried to find another way.
"Captain Darik?"
The boy nodded.
"Did you see him fall?"
"No, General. He pushed me through the dye-room door. Told me to get you the number."
There was a streak of blue across the boy's sleeve. Dye, not blood. Bisera found herself looking at it with unreasonable attention.
"Forty-one," he said. "I counted before we left the barricade. He made me count."
She put the stylus to the third tablet.
Darik had been wrong about the roof. She had meant to tell him so later.
Forty-one.
Not all seen dead. None reached. No road back she could open without spending the next group too.
She scored the number beneath the preceding tally.
"Go to the northern postern," she told the boy. "Find the ward officers. Tell them what you told me."
"I can stay."
"You have delivered his message. Now live long enough to remember his name."
He tried to answer. Nothing came. She put her hand on his shoulder once and sent him away.
Below, a Gillyrian helmet appeared behind a wall that had been safe when she last looked at it.
The next group still might come back.
"Clear the two rows," she told her remaining officers. "Through the rear courts first. No torch until our last men are out."
The men nearest her understood. One stared at the houses, then at her.
The officers had reported those houses cleared. Names had been ticked on ward rolls; doors had been knocked upon and opened. Most of the inhabitants should be on the road or beneath the western white cloths. Most. Some names were still missing, and a clerk's mark could not tell her which side of a wall a frightened person had chosen.
The two rows lay within the southeastern fighting quarter, separated from the shelters by market ground and open yards. Hook teams waited at the cross street. The roofs downwind had fallen long ago. She had arranged all of that.
It did not make the little blue door at the end of the nearer row less recognisable.
A woman had stood there the previous evening with flour on her wrist and asked whether the army truly meant to leave. Bisera had told her the truth. The woman had gone inside, brought out a heel of bread, and pressed it upon the runner beside her.
Now a Gillyrian pick came through the plaster above the door.
Smoke rose from a broken lintel and drifted east-southeast, away from the western precincts. Bisera followed it with her eyes while the nearest officer waited for the word.
"General." The runner beside him swallowed. "One of the roof men thought he saw movement in the far row. At the brown shutters, before the roof watch withdrew."
"Ours?"
"He could not tell."
"Can anyone reach it?"
The runner looked at the helmets showing through the cut partitions. That was his answer. Bisera could send men into the row, or she could keep the passage open for the group already coming back. She could not do both. A small movement behind a shutter might have been a shield, a curtain, a woman who had hidden when the door was knocked.
The last friendly file raised its hand at the nearer corner. She waited until it had cleared the mouth of the lane. The officer beside her glanced at the tablet with the missing names.
"Fire the rows."
Her voice failed on the final word. She made herself say it again, lower, looking at the man who had to obey rather than at the place she could no longer check.
Flame found the prepared timber. At first there was only a bright seam in one doorway; then a window filled, and fire passed through the houses like a rumour finding people willing to carry it. The same openings that had admitted Theophilus's crews drew smoke into the next room and the next.
A pick struck twice more. Stopped.
The engineer crews came out coughing, bent beneath shields, hauling men by belts and wrists. Others ran into the streets and found Vakerian spears still waiting at the corners. Bisera watched the brown shutters until smoke covered them. She saw nobody come out. She could not assure herself that it meant nobody had been inside.
Her last files retreated in the space the fire had bought them. No triumph came with it.
Part 4
Vesmir had been a soldier long enough to know when men were about to run.
It was not in the feet first. It was in the eyes. The glance behind, then another. The shield drawn too close to protect the bearer and no longer quite far enough to protect the man beside him.
"Look at me," he told the boy on his left.
The boy looked.
"You see me running?"
"No, Captain."
"There you are, then."
They stood outside a storehouse beneath the lower approach, the last shield line before the turn uphill. Somewhere behind them, the horn sounded. Axes on a door drowned it. Vesmir saw the man to his right begin to move and understood the order a heartbeat late.
"Back by pairs. You first."
"Captain—"
"I am old. I take longer to get bored. Go."
A spear slid beneath his raised arm. He twisted. Almost enough.
The head tore through his side with a hot, inward shock that seemed less like pain than an objection his whole body had raised at once. He trapped the shaft under his elbow, pulled its owner off balance, and drove his sword into him.
For one astonished moment the two men held each other up. Then Vesmir's knees failed.
Hands caught him before he reached the paving.
"I can walk."
"You can bleed," said the soldier beneath his right arm. "I have seen you do it."
The bearer glanced at his companion.
They dragged him backward beneath their shields as the storehouse roof came down behind them. Tile struck tile. Heat rolled over his face. He tried to turn, to count the men coming after, but one of the soldiers caught his chin and faced him uphill.
"They're coming. Save your strength."
Vesmir's hand closed over his coat.
The three sheets were still there, sewn inside: the hour, the witnesses, the form of the covenant. He had put his stitches through the cloth with a needle too small for his fingers. Velika had laughed at the work and then gone quiet when she understood what he was preserving.
He had carried dispatches through worse. Perhaps not worse. He could no longer remember.
They got him through the southern upper gate and called for bearers to take him on to the citadel. Someone pressed a pad against his side. He swore at the pressure, which reassured them more than any other reaction could have.
His fingers stayed over the crooked stitching while they lifted him.
The parchment crackled beneath his palm.
From the wall-walk, Bisera watched Vesmir's litter turn onto the road to the hill. Marcus waited beside her.
"A hundred fit," he said.
She looked down at the tablet. Three hundred had filled the first tally at dawn.
A message came from Riverside Gate I. When the crossing officer had sent it, the last civilian ward files had reached the north bank. Rear guards were still feeding through the two surviving lanes. The handline crews and covering parties would wait for them.
The leading wards were already moving into the Old North Channel. The last households were only just out of the water. Bisera closed her eyes.
For one breath she allowed herself that much.
Then she opened her eyes and saw the Gillyrians beginning to form in the market below.
"Tell Saralta."
Part 5
There was one order Bisera had given long before the events of the day had begun.
The previous night, in the washing room, she had been sitting at the clear end of the bench, wrapped in a towel with water still dripping from her hair. James's soap scented the steam. Her armour lay in pieces beside her; Saralta had taken up a comb, and Velika stood near the door with the dry linen folded beside her.
"Knowledge and experience are not the same thing," Velika had said.
The wedding-bed teasing ended there. For a moment the only sound was water finding the grated drain.
"Tomorrow, James may refuse the evacuation order."
"May?" Velika asked.
"He will refuse."
There was no vanity in the certainty. He had told her he would fight her over the oath until the last possible moment. James would stand before an army with frightened hands and no useful answer because the woman he loved stood on the wrong side of it. She trusted his love absolutely. That was why she could not trust him to leave.
"You will try reason first," she told Velika. "When the last aid post moves. Give him people to protect. He goes farther for someone else than for himself."
"And when he decides that someone else is you?"
Bisera turned to Saralta. The princess set the comb down before the request was spoken.
"No."
"I need you to take him."
"You have guards."
"They will not lay hands on him. They would sooner strike a priest at the altar than lay their hands on him."
"And I am convenient because I am a heathen?"
"Because you love him enough to bear his anger. And because you are the only person I trust to be stronger than his refusal. And also because Seraphina knows you."
Saralta looked away. For once she did not turn an unwelcome truth into a joke.
"Then trust me to carry you both."
For one foolish instant Bisera pictured it: a horse, the three of them, James protesting the danger while Saralta complained about the weight and rode faster. She wanted it so badly that she had to grip the edge of the bench.
"You know why I cannot."
"I know what you have decided. It is not the same thing."
Velika looked toward the door. "Serko is waiting. Vesmir is waiting. There is a wedding waiting."
"I have not got another time."
That silenced all three of them. Bisera swallowed, tasting soap where water had run across her lips.
"Have a remount ready. Finish your work with the reserve, then come to the citadel when I send for you. The runner will say I require you at the aid post. Not before. I will not strip a fighting line to save one man, even him. I will order James to go. If he refuses, you put him on the horse and escort him out with your cavalry."
"And he fights me?"
"Hold him."
"And thinks me a traitor?"
"He will understand." Bisera's mouth trembled. "He is smart enough. But he must live long enough to do it."
Saralta's anger changed into something more difficult to face. Bisera saw her preparing to refuse again and slid from the bench before she could speak. Her knees touched the cold stone.
"Do not—"
"Please. I am begging you. Bring James away from here."
Saralta caught her beneath the arms. Velika was beside them at once, but for an instant Bisera would not rise.
"Stand up," Saralta said, tears running freely now. "Don't make me do the impossible. Stand up."
They got her onto the bench. For a while all three pretended that straightening a towel required their whole attention. Bisera watched Saralta's hands, strong and careful despite the moment: hands she had seen steady a frightened horse and carry a cup to a sick man without making either feel its weakness.
"You do love him."
"Yes."
The simplicity hurt. She had known in James's kitchen, in the questions that continued long after the answer mattered less than hearing him speak. Sometimes she had pretended not to know because the pretending allowed them all to laugh. Saralta treated a happy household as a tent whose ropes could always be moved a little farther out. Bisera's insistence upon monogamy seemed to her an unnecessary hardship for three people who already enjoyed one another's company.
Bisera wanted James to herself. She would not dress that truth in prayer and call it something holier. She had disliked other women's hands on him; a voice from his past had made her jealous of a land she did not know how to enter. But jealousy had not been the whole of it.
She had buried men who were laughing at breakfast. She had watched fever take a mother's children before the first small grave was finished. Eternity was not a decoration beyond those losses. It was where she had put everything she treasured. She had put James there too: years together if the Spirit granted them, and beyond the years an eternity where they would be freed from all earthly sufferings.
How could she risk that for anything? How could she help him do what she believed would imperil his soul and call it love merely because they had both wanted it? Saralta did not understand every border of that fear. Beneath the teasing, she had nevertheless learned where to stop. That, too, was why Bisera had chosen her.
"I never wanted to take your place beside him," Saralta said. "I wanted a place beside you. Both of you. Not the place you leave behind."
"I know. That is why I can ask."
"You cannot give him to me. You should know he would never accept it."
"No. I can only ask you not to leave him alone." Bisera looked down at their hands. "You make him laugh. You make him explain things until he forgets to be sad. He listens to you as though finding something he did not know he had missed. If he lives, if there is time—perhaps one day he could love you in the way you deserve."
She could imagine it. That was the worst part. Saralta at his table with an open book; James cooking while she stole food from the pan. A house full of voices that were not her voice. His life continuing.
"I will not take his grief as permission," Saralta said.
"I would never ask it. If he turns toward you one day, do not turn him away for my sake. When I am truly gone. Honourably."
"And your heaven?"
Bisera's fingers tightened in the towel. "I still hope to find him there."
"But not me there?"
She had not imagined asking eternity to wait while another woman loved him through the years she would never have.
"I do not know. I cannot tell the Spirit how to be merciful. And I cannot ask James to spend the rest of his life beside an empty chair."
"You are arranging our wedding before your own."
"Apparently I am intolerable even when generous."
Velika made a sound of sadness. Saralta did not smile.
"Yes. You are." She wiped her face. "I will take him out if you give the signal and he will not come. Afterward I will stay while he needs a friend. If he never wants more from me, I will still stay for as long as he allows. That is what I can promise. After all, he can always disappear into his magical realm where I cannot reach him."
Bisera bowed her head. Relief came, with jealousy shamefully alive beneath it. She did not want to be admirable; she wanted Saralta to laugh at this terrible misunderstanding and tell her there was another way.
Instead the princess glanced at the white linen on the bench.
Part 6
James was still watching Vesmir's bandage when he heard Bisera in the courtyard.
Not the words. The voice was too worn for that, scraped almost past recognition. But he knew the effort behind it — the small pause before she answered, the breath taken carefully enough to hide how little of it was left.
He looked toward the doorway.
James checked the bandage once more and stood.
"Tell me at once if that darkens."
"I shall shout," Vesmir said. "Apparently, it is the only thing I still do satisfactorily."
On another morning James would have laughed. He set the cloth down beside the basin and went out to meet his wife.
Bisera had come up from the southern upper gate. Dust lay in the creases of her armour, and one sleeve was dark below the elbow. She stood just inside the citadel arch with her helmet in one hand, listening to a runner whose chest was still heaving from the climb.
"The outer South Gate is open," the boy said. "They have brought a ram through. The engineers are laying timber on the road."
"How far?"
"Still below the market when I left."
She nodded and sent him on to Marcus.
James crossed the courtyard before the runner had cleared the arch.
"Vesmir's in. The bleeding's stopped coming through."
She turned, and for an instant there was nothing in her face but relief.
"He is conscious?"
"Conscious enough to object to everything."
Her mouth almost moved into a smile.
"And Velika's line is out," he went on. "The northern watch sent word. The litters are through the upper postern, and the guides are taking them down to Riverside Gate I. She has the dressings, the blankets, everything we could carry."
"Did she speak to you?"
"She called us both impossible. Then she hit me. Then she embraced me, and then she told me to be alive when she next saw me, as though I'd been missing appointments."
This time the smile came, small and painful.
"That does sound like Velika."
"The aid post is empty now. Apart from Vesmir, there's nobody waiting."
Bisera looked past him toward the open doorway.
He had brought her three pieces of good news. Only when her eyes came back to his did he begin to understand that she had heard something else inside them.
Nothing left to bind. Nobody else to wait for.
He had run out of patients.
Beyond the arch another file was coming up from the southern approach. The men walked with their shields slung across their backs so their hands would be free to help the wounded, and they turned north along the road without stopping. One had lost his helmet and kept a palm pressed to his scalp. Another carried two spears and seemed unable to decide which of them was his.
Behind the file came riders, five of them, moving at a walk. Their sleeves were dark. The last man led a horse with an empty saddle and did not look at it.
James had heard the account while Vesmir was being carried in. Saralta had struck the Gillyrians as they formed in the market and driven them back long enough for the last of the wounded to pass uphill. He had not asked what it cost. Looking at the riderless horse, he found he did not have to.
"You got them out," he said.
"Some."
"The ward messenger said the last families were across."
Her eyes closed briefly, then opened.
"Yes."
He took her free hand. The glove was cold and stiff, and beneath it her fingers closed around his with a strength that was not quite steady.
"My love," he said.
The words changed her face.
"My husband."
For a moment they stood there with the courtyard moving around them, and James could almost believe that two words had altered what was possible.
Then a horn sounded downhill.
He could not see the market from here. The buildings and the rise of the upper town hid it, as they hid the broken corner and all the places where men had spent the morning dying. But he had learned the direction of sounds. The bridge fighting came faintly, from the river. This came from the south: shields striking, a shouted command, another horn answering closer to the upper approach.
Alexander's men were advancing.
"Come with me," James said.
Bisera's hand tightened.
"We can still go. Your people are moving. The families are over. Vesmir can be carried."
"Marcus is still at the southern gate with fifty men."
"Then tell him to follow."
"He will. After the gate is closed and packed." She spoke evenly, the way she spoke to officers who had asked a reasonable question badly. "There are covering parties on the bank, James. The last military files are still in the water. I cannot leave men standing about waiting for an order from me."
He nodded quickly. That was an answer he could work with.
"Then we wait."
She said nothing.
"We let Marcus finish. We send him ahead with Vesmir. When the last men are through, we go after them."
A bearer called softly for room.
James stepped aside as they brought Vesmir out of the aid room. He turned with the shutter they were using as a litter, putting his back to the arch while the men eased the captain down onto the low supports beneath the covered walk. One of them adjusted the cloak; another crouched to check that the padding had not shifted.
Bisera set her helmet on an empty medicine crate.
"Keep him here until Marcus comes," she told the bearers. "Out of the wind. The final detachment will take him."
Vesmir's eyes found hers. Something passed between them that James did not want to understand.
He caught her hand again.
"That settles it, then. We wait here together. Nobody gets left."
At the arch behind him, Saralta drew rein.
Her five riders halted with her. One held a spare horse, already saddled and standing quiet. Her sleeve was dark to the wrist, and a loose bell in her hair touched another when she turned her head, a small bright sound with no business in that courtyard.
She looked at Bisera over James's shoulder.
Bisera's gaze moved to her, and back, and did not stop anywhere on the way.
James was still talking.
"I am not coming."
The words were quiet enough that he nearly laid his own over the top of them.
Then they reached him.
He looked at her.
"Not yet."
"James."
"You mean not yet."
She shook her head.
The courtyard did not go silent. A bearer was asking for another fold of wool. Somebody outside the arch called for a file to keep moving. The ordinary sounds went on with an indifference that had suddenly become unbearable.
"When Marcus has gone," Bisera said, "I will close the northern postern."
"And then?"
Her eyes held his.
"Then I go back to the southern gatehouse."
He had known. Since the undercroft. Since the wedding. But he thought he had managed to change her mind. He had run the entire morning on that hope.
Hearing it was different.
There was no patient between them now. No fresh alarm to interrupt her. No argument about who could be moved and who could not.
Only the thing she had told him from the beginning.
"Because of the oath."
"Yes."
"You've saved the army."
"I swore—"
"I know what you swore."
It came out harder than he meant it to. She flinched, and the sight of it hurt him worse than the words had hurt her.
He looked down at their joined hands. Hers had held a sword all morning. His had pressed cloth into strangers' wounds. There was dried blood in the narrow channel beside his wedding ring.
"We'll find another way," he said, and even he could hear how little was left inside the sentence.
Bisera shook her head again.
Behind him a horse's bridle jingled.
James looked back toward the aid-room door. An empty table. A basin. The cloth he had set down. Vesmir covered and watched, with bearers ready and an escort coming for him. Nothing that remained to be done for the captain required James to stay inside Podem.
He could leave.
There were men waiting to take him to the river, dry clothes somewhere beyond it, roads leading away from this morning. His own world still existed. White rooms. Warm water. A kitchen in which nothing worse than a pan could burn.
Bisera was standing in front of him.
"Then I'm staying."
Her fingers stopped moving in his.
"James."
"I'm not going without you."
"You will be killed."
He swallowed. His mouth had gone dry.
"Then I die here too."
For one heartbeat he was as shocked as she was.
What are you saying?
The thought arrived with such force that he nearly looked around for somebody who might stop him. He wanted to live. He wanted it fiercely and physically — the next breath, a meal, a bed, a morning in which he could open his eyes without first listening for weapons. Nothing in him had gone quiet about any of it.
Take it back. You can still take it back.
Bisera stared at him.
He had expected to feel brave after saying a thing like that. Instead his knees were unreliable, and some practical, outraged part of his mind was shouting at him the way a man shouts at himself while watching his own life go into a fire.
He did not take it back.
"With you," he added, barely above a whisper.
He had seen her receive worse news than this without her face moving at all.
It moved now.
Something went out of it and something else came into it, and whatever the second thing was, it had not been prepared for. She had known he would refuse her. She had not known he would stop bargaining.
Her mouth opened and closed. Her hand went still in his — not withdrawn, simply stopped, the way a hand stops when its owner has run out of things to try.
Then she looked past him at the guard standing beside the covered walk.
"Take the Great Mage to the northern postern."
She said it without hope.
The older man stepped forward. James drew back, and the hand reaching for his sleeve stopped short of the cloth.
"General. I …"
His fingers curled against his own palm.
Bisera looked at the useless hand, and then at the man whose pious fear had stopped him, and gave him one small nod. Stand away. The guard stood away.
James turned back to her.
"Please."
She put her arms around him so suddenly that the word died against her shoulder.
He caught her. Armour pressed into his chest; beneath it he felt her struggling for breath. Then her hand came behind his neck and drew his face to hers.
She kissed him.
Briefly, fiercely, with a hunger that emptied his head. He closed his eyes. Her fingers tightened in his coat and held him there when he tried to lift his head.
Salt touched his lips.
A stirrup creaked behind him. A boot met stone.
He opened his eyes.
Tears were already streaming down her face.
Not gathering. Not beginning. Running through the dust beside her nose and over the hand he had lifted to her cheek.
"Bisera?"
"Saralta. Now."
The last word tore through her voice. Her hands opened.
Without James noticing, Saralta's horse had already arrived beside him. Saralta leaned down from its saddle, her feet braced in the stirrups. An arm caught James beneath the shoulder; at the same instant, one of Saralta's dismounted riders lifted him under the thighs.
"What—"
His fingers struck Bisera's sleeve and slid off the armour.
Warmth stirred against his neck. Saralta hauled him upward while the man beneath him bore his weight close against the saddle. Leather creaked; the horse shifted a hoof, checked by Saralta. James landed sideways on the padding. The rider lifted his far leg clear as Saralta turned him astride in front of her.
Before the supporting hands withdrew, she locked both arms around him, over his upper arms, trapping his elbows against his sides. One hand closed around the opposite wrist. She drew him back into her breastplate.
"Put me down."
"No."
"Put me DOWN."
He tried to wrench an elbow free. Then he let his weight fall forward, willing to hit the paving. Her grip bore him back; the man beside the horse checked his knee before he could drag it over the saddle.
"Saralta!"
Her arms trembled against his. He felt the effort in them, the uneven breath at his shoulder. The hold did not open.
"You may be angry for the rest of your life," she said. "I intend you to have one."
His hands could reach her wrists. He pulled until his own fingers hurt.
The Vakerian guards had not moved.
"My sky does not watch this the way yours does," Saralta told them. "Let me answer for it."
She turned the horse toward the arch.
"Bisera! Tell her to stop!"
"Bisera! Tell her!"
James strained to look back. Saralta allowed the twist of his shoulders but kept his hips against her. Bisera stood behind them, one hand still raised where his face had been.
Already behind them.
"James."
Saralta halted their advance. His elbows remained pinned; he could only turn one palm toward Bisera, reaching with his fingers.
"Tell her to let me go."
Bisera looked at his outstretched hand.
Then at Saralta.
And he understood.
The dismounted rider. The arms that had been there the instant his wife released him.
"You two planned this!"
Bisera's mouth trembled.
"Before the wedding."
He stopped pulling at Saralta's wrists.
"You knew."
"I knew you loved me."
"Then how can you—"
"Because I love you."
The answer struck him without answering anything.
All that time.
"You were going to let me believe—"
"I wanted you to enjoy our wedding night." Her voice caught. She swallowed and tried again.
"Then come with me."
His hand was still reaching toward her. He had forgotten to lower it.
She looked at it as though the space between them had become something she would have to cross under fire.
"Remember me," she said. "If you can."
"Please," he said.
She lifted her hand. For an instant he thought she would cross the space between them. Instead she pressed her fingers against her mouth, where the kiss was still warm.
"Farewell, my love."
"No."
"Live a happy life. For both of us."
He shook his head, hard, lest she mistake stillness for agreement.
Bisera looked past him at Saralta.
The old possessiveness came back for an instant.
Saralta held James so completely. Both arms around him, his weight against her, her cheek close to the hair Bisera had touched in the lamplight. He was fighting that embrace now. There might come a day when he turned into it willingly.
A table. Books left open. Laughter in rooms Bisera had already begun to think of as theirs.
She wanted those years so badly that for a heartbeat she could not breathe.
Even now, some small, frightened part of her wanted to demand the chance to redo last night.
His hand reached toward her. The silver ring caught the light.
She looked at the ring until she could speak. Last night she had put hers on for a lifetime. A few hours had not made the promise smaller. It had only left her less time to bear what she believed it required.
"Take care of him."
Saralta's tears fell onto the shoulder of his coat. She could not wipe them away without loosening her hold. James shifted again; the princess closed her eyes, gathered strength, and held him closer.
When she looked up, she met Bisera's gaze.
"I promised."
Bisera lowered her empty hand.
Then the horse started to speed up.
"BISERA!"
"Come with us. Please!"
For a split second, Bisera's face changed.
She took a step.
In his direction.
A horn sounded from the southern approach.
Bisera stopped.
For one heartbeat she remained between the step she had taken and the place she had left, looking at him with an expression he would never be able to forget.
Then her hand found the helmet on the crate.
She took it up.
She looked at him once more.
And turned toward the sound.
He fought Saralta's arms again, without strength or plan now, simply because the horse was moving and Bisera was not coming with them.
James had no argument left. No cleverness. No promise that could make her turn again.
Seraphina. Please. Help.
For a heartbeat there were only the scrape of hooves on stone and Saralta's broken breathing close behind his ear.
Then Seraphina's voice arrived in his mind.
Have some faith.