SURELY PICK TO LEAD US.
And so in the early days of the siege, before Lord
Derek unraveled completely and rode off into death and the
horrible oblivion of legends, we spent our time watching the
battlements and the dwindling food, looking for smoke on
the horizon and listening to the sound of the horn by night
and the rumor by day that somewhere, forgotten within the
bowels of the fortress, lay something the kender had
stumbled upon in his curious wanderings, something that
could – if time and place and desperation were to meet –
alter the course of the siege.
It is tiring to remember this all, Bayard, for already I grow
unaccustomed to the old habit of seeing, and though it
would seem that the memory of vision would be that much
more strongly burned into the thoughts of the newly blind,
when you lose the habits of seeing you often lose the
memories of sight, for the motions of the eyes and the mind
grow rusty and with them the thoughts established before
through those motions.
And what is more, the light must be fading, night must
be approaching, for the warmth that settles upon the sill of
my window is fading now and I smell smoke and burning
tallow as I face into the room. Some things there are for
which the night should have no ear, and among those are
the ride of Lord Derek and the disasters that followed. So
again in the morning, if my nurse will only remain patient –
patient and undeniably kind – I shall recount the darkest leg
of the journey.
THREE
It was rumor that passed among us once more, rumor
again of movement and of battle, but this time there seemed
more substance to it, for on the battlements and in the
chambers the knights were silent, the only storm arising
from a conference room high in the tower, where Alfred and
Derek and Sturm waged a war of words and of rising
voices, an occasional shout or a fragment of speech caught
when the wind died and the sound descended to the
courtyards and the barracks of the fortress.
We could make nothing of this debate above us, these
loud quarrels like the distant cries of predatory birds, but it
was different from the nights of the winding horn, the
sudden preparations for the false alarms, for now we did
nothing but wait – no preparations, no rumors of what was
taking place beyond SOMETHING IS TAKING PLACE –
and the fortress incredibly silent, as though the horses were
lost in thought and the vermin had quit the rafters and the
middens by instinct, going Huma knows where into the
winter darkness.
I awoke on the second night to the jostling of Heros.
He was fully armed, having dressed himself while I slept, as
though there was no time to waken a squire (or as I came to
see later, as though somehow in arming himself he took part
in a strange penance, having last performed the task on the
night of vigil before his knighthood ceremonies).
DEREK IS RIDING OUT, he said flatly, averting his
eyes as my thoughts rose out of sleep, constructing once
again from the bare walls and the damp cold of the chamber
just where it was I had awakened, at first thinking that
Heros was announcing retreat, surrender, abandonment,
then realizing it was none of these and all of these at the
same time – that an attack too monstrous to be ill-advised
and too foolish to be heroic was set to begin, and that in the
courtyards of the fortress the footmen were marshalling.
There was nothing to be said, nothing to be asked
except, AND YOU?
His eyes still avoided me. STURM FEELS THAT THE
DEFENSE OF THE FORTRESS REMAINS THE DEFENSE
OF PALANTHAS. I AGREE WITH STURM.
BUT NOT AGREEMENT, I thought. NOTHING MORE
THAN SHEER AND DELIBERATE SURVIVAL, IF NOT A
LASTING SURVIVAL THEN THE WEEKS, THE DAYS, OR
EVEN THE HOURS THAT STAYING BEHIND WILL GIVE
US. THAT IS WHY YOU HAVE ARMED YOURSELF
WITHOUT RECOURSE TO SQUIRE AND TO
CEREMONY. THAT IS WHY YOU ARE GLAD THAT THE