Chapter 70

Chapter 70: Chapter 70

It started snowing right as we climbed over the low timber fence behind the stables.

It wasn’t the light, dry powder they get up in the northern mountains that blows off your coat with a shake. It was lake snow—big, wet flakes the size of silver marks that stuck to our eyebrows and soaked straight into the wool of our hoods within five minutes.

"Watch the roots here," Kaelen said from five paces ahead of us, his voice barely louder than the hiss of snow hitting the dead pine needles. "The ground drops three feet into a ditch on the left."

Behind me, Luckas let out a quiet curse as his right boot slid six inches in the greasy mud under the fresh white layer, his hand catching the trunk of a birch tree to stay upright. "Whose bright idea was it to come out here after dark without a lantern?"

"Mine," I said, stepping around the birch tree and testing the frozen lip of the ditch with my heel. "And if you light a fire to warm your ears, the night watch on the north wall will spot us in ten seconds and dock us twenty points for breaking curfew."

"My ears are fine," Luckas muttered, though he pulled his wool muffler up over the tip of his nose until only his eyes showed. "It’s my toes I can’t feel. That pig fat you told me to rub on my boots smells like rancid bacon, Elvit."

"Keeps the stitches from leaking," I replied.

We walked another three hundred yards through the scrub oak until the trees thinned out and the smell of wet creek clay replaced the pine resin.

The Old Mill Bridge sat at the bottom of Sector Two, spanning a thirty-foot gorge where the Bramble creek ran down toward the lake. There hadn’t been a mill here in a hundred years—just a square stone foundation choked with dead brambles on the north bank, and a single-arch limestone bridge about twelve feet wide with waist-high stone parapets on either side.

We crouched behind a clump of juniper bushes forty yards up the north slope and looked down through the falling snow.

"Nobody’s here," Nia whispered, rubbing her mittened hands together under her cloak. "I thought for sure some of the second-years would come out to check the footing."

"Second-years like warm beds," Kaelen said.

He didn’t stay in the bushes with us. He trotted down the bank without making a sound on the wet grass, walked out onto the middle of the bridge, and leaned over the upstream parapet to look down at the water. After a minute, he waved us down.

The stones of the bridge road were slick with a thin skin of black ice underneath half an inch of wet slush. I walked out to the center of the arch and stamped my heel down once. The stone was solid, laid over heavy rubble fill, but the mortar along the bottom course of the low side walls had crumbled away over fifty winters of freezing and thawing.

"Look down there," Kaelen said, pointing over the right-hand wall toward the water twelve feet below us.

The creek wasn’t frozen solid—the current down the ravine was too fast for that—but thick shelves of milky grey ice extended four feet out from both mud banks, leaving a narrow channel of black water rushing down the middle over jagged rocks.

Right under the curve of the bridge arch, about four feet above the waterline, a row of square holes six inches wide ran straight across the stone piers on both sides.

"Putlog holes," Nia said, leaning over the cold stone beside me. "My father had our estate bridge rebuilt two summers ago. When the masons build the arch, they stick square oak beams into those holes to hold up the wooden scaffolding, and when they’re done, they pull the beams out and leave the holes open so rainwater can drain out of the stone."

I leaned further over the wall, squinting through the dark. The snow was getting thicker, turning the creek banks grey-white, so I pulled my right cuff back an inch and let a tiny thread of warmth touch the rune on my forearm—just enough to sharpen the dark edges of the stonework below without making my eye glow bright enough to see from the watchtowers.

The square holes were about four feet apart, four inches deep, and dry inside because the overhang of the stone arch kept the snow off them.

"How wide is this bridge?" I asked, turning back to look at the road between the parapets.

"Eleven feet, eight inches from wall to wall," Luckas said, having just paced it off heel-to-toe from one side to the other. "If we draw Attack on Monday, and the other squad puts three heavy shields abreast in the middle of the arch, there’s zero room to go around them. You’d have to climb onto the parapet wall to pass them, and with this slush on the top stones, anybody who tries to run along the wall is going straight into the creek."

"And if you fall in the creek in full winter wool," Nia added, shivering as a chunk of slush slid off the bank below and splashed into the black water, "Toris calls you dead for hypothermia before you even crawl out."

I looked back down at the row of square mason holes running under the arch, out of sight of anyone standing on top of the bridge road.

"Kaelen," I said, tapping the stone parapet. "Can you get across those holes with your gloves on?"

Kaelen leaned over the edge, measuring the four-foot gaps between the square sockets with his eyes. "In the dry? In ten seconds. With wet fingers, maybe twenty."

"What about me?"

Kaelen looked at my shoulders and the heavy bastard sword strapped across my back, then back at the four-inch stone ledges. "If you leave the big sword up here with Vance and use your climbing irons? Yeah. Your hands are strong enough. Just don’t look down at the water."

"Wait a second," Luckas said, walking over and peering over the wet stone behind us. "You want to climb across the underside of the bridge while they’re standing on top of it? Elvit, if you slip off that rock, you land flat on your back on river boulders."

"Then I won’t slip," I said, pulling my cuff back down over my wrist and tucking my chin into my collar as the wind picked up down the gorge. "Come on. Let’s walk the south bank so Nia knows where the ditches are, and then we’re going back to the dorms. If we stay out here another twenty minutes, our wet cloaks are going to freeze stiff before we get over the fence."

By Monday morning, the six inches of Friday snow had been packed down by two hundred pairs of boots into a greasy grey sheet along the main paths, while the untouched woods inside the Bramble sat under a foot of heavy white crust.

The sixty-four squads were lined up in four long ranks across the north staging yard at seven-thirty.

Up on the raised wooden platform beside Master Toris’s watchtower, the carpentry crew had built a covered viewing pavilion hung with thick green wool curtains to keep the lake wind off the guests. Two large iron braziers filled with glowing charcoal sat at the front corners of the platform, and inside, sitting on cushioned camp chairs with heavy fur lap-robes over their knees, were a dozen Imperial staff officers and sixteen nobles from the Kingdom of Sospurro.

King Alfonzo’s youngest brother, Duke Ramiro of Sospurro, sat in the middle chair. He was a fat, red-faced man in his fifties wearing a white velvet coat trimmed with sable fur and a gold monocle on a ribbon that he didn’t even bother lifting to look at us; he was much more interested in a silver flask of spiced brandy that Captain Varga kept refilling for him every five minutes.

Four chairs to the left, with an empty table between them, sat the gold-corded Sospurro officers led by Lord Lorenzo, who was whispering something into the ear of an elderly Imperial general from the War Ministry while pointing out across the snow toward the fourth-year squads.

"Look at them up there," Luckas muttered from beside me, stamping his boots on the frozen grass to keep the blood moving in his feet. "We’re out here freezing our noses off for a chance to go die in their mud, and the Duke hasn’t looked up from his brandy cup since the bugle blew."

"Good," Kaelen said, checking the leather straps on his padded training vest. "The less they watch us in the first round, the less the quarterfinal teams know before Thursday."

Up on the watchtower steps, Master Toris didn’t have a fur robe or a charcoal brazier. He wore his usual oiled leather coat with snow piling up on his bare grey head, holding his brass speaking horn in one woolen mitten.

"Round One! Thirty-two matches across eight sectors!" Toris bellowed through the horn, his breath shooting out the end like steam from a kettle. "Standard objective rules! One squad holds the sector marker; one squad attacks! Fifteen minutes on the glass! If the attackers put two live cadets across the south marker line—or chalk out three of the four defenders—the attackers advance! If the glass runs out first, the defenders advance! Listen for your sector assignments!"

It took ten minutes to read down the parchment roll.

"Sector Two—the Old Mill Bridge!" Toris barked, turning a stiff page with his thumb. "Defending: Third-Year Squad Twelve—Oakes, Garrick, Perrin, and Lyle! Attacking: First-Year Squad Seven—Elvit, Vance, Kaelen, and Valerius! Report to the north gate on the bell!"

Thirty yards down the line, four third-year boys in heavy grey coats exchanged satisfied nods.

I knew Alden Oakes by sight from the cafeteria. He sat at Rank Forty-Six overall—a thick-chested nineteen-year-old from the northern timber baronies who fought with a heavy oval wooden shield and a broad-bladed shortsword. His two front-line partners, Garrick and Perrin, were built almost identically to him, like three barrels of salted beef lined up in a row, while their fourth man, Lyle, was a tall, gangly wind-mage who specialized in knocking people off their feet with compressed air blasts when they tried to jump trenches.

"Well," Nia said, tightening the leather chin-strap of her padded winter cap and picking up her shortened five-foot boar-spear and iron buckler. "At least you picked the right bridge on Friday night. How do you want to run it?"

"Same way we talked about," I said, unbuckling the heavy wooden practice bastard sword from my back and handing it to Luckas by the crossguard. "Oakes has three heavy shields. As soon as the whistle blows, he’s going to march straight out to the middle of the stone arch and lock shields wall-to-wall with Lyle standing behind them to blow anyone off the parapets who tries to jump over."

Luckas took my wooden bastard sword in his left hand, resting his own chalked longsword against his right shoulder. "Two big blades. Look at me, I’m a vanguard berserker now. How long do you and Kaelen need to get under the arch?"

"Three minutes from the whistle," I said, checking the two short wooden daggers smeared with red chalk at my belt and making sure the small iron ice-crampons Master Bram had forged for my boot heels were strapped tight under my arches. "Walk down the north road where Oakes can see you. Keep Nia on your left hip so Lyle can’t get a clean wind-line at her feet. Bang on their shields, make a lot of sparks, and don’t let them push across to our side of the bank until you see Kaelen’s head come over the back wall."

"Three minutes against three third-year shields," Nia said, letting out a long white puff of breath and banging her small iron buckler once against the shaft of her spear with a sharp clack. "Easy enough. Try not to fall in the water, Lieutenant. I don’t want to carry Luckas’s ego all the way back to the dorms by myself."

"My ego is very light, Valerius," Luckas said, grinning as the proctor opened the wooden gate to Sector Two. "Barely weighs a thing."

Ten minutes later, we stood in the calf-deep snow behind the ruined stone walls of the old mill on the north bank. Across the gorge, eighty yards away through the grey birch trees, Oakes and his three third-years were waiting by the south marker pole.

Down on the bridge bank, a second-year proctor in a bright yellow wool vest checked his pocket watch, raised a brass whistle to his lips, and blew one sharp blast.

Oakes didn’t waste a second. His three heavy men trotted straight out onto the stone bridge, their wide oval shields overlapping like scales on a fish from the left parapet to the right parapet, their heavy wooden shortswords resting in the notches between the shields. Ten feet behind them, Lyle planted his boots in the slush with his hands raised, ready to throw a wall of wind at anyone who got close.

"Go," I said quietly.

Kaelen and I didn’t step onto the road. We stayed behind the ruined mill wall, dropped down on our bellies in the deep snow behind the juniper bushes, and slid feet-first down the steep, snowy mud bank forty yards upstream from the bridge, completely hidden from the road by the curve of the ravine wall.

Up above us on the road, Luckas didn’t bother hiding at all.

"Morning, Oakes!" Luckas’s voice rang out across the gorge, loud and cheerful. "Lovely weather for a walk, isn’t it? Bit slushy on the stones!"

He and Nia came marching right down the center of the north bridge approach side by side.

Because Luckas was carrying my heavy wooden bastard sword in his left hand and had his cloak hood pulled halfway up, from forty yards away through the blowing snow spindles, it looked exactly like he and I were coming straight down the chute together while Nia stayed behind his shoulder.

"Hold the crown of the arch!" Oakes barked from behind his center shield, bracing his back boot against a dry stone as Luckas and Nia stepped onto the north end of the bridge. "They left their scout in the trees to throw weights! Keep your chins down and watch the left parapet! Garrick, lock your rim inside mine!"

Down at the bottom of the ravine, the cold hit my chest through my wool tunic as Kaelen and I dropped onto the four-foot shelf of crusty grey ice lining the north bank of the creek.

Up close, the black water rushing down the middle channel was loud—a steady, churning roar over the rocks that completely drowned out the sound of our iron heel-crampons biting into the ice shelf.

We hunched low and scrambled forty yards downstream under the overhanging snow lip of the bank until we reached the shadow beneath the stone bridge arch.

Right above our heads, heavy boots thudded violently against the stone vaulting, followed by the loud whack of ash wood hitting oak shields and a sudden, roaring whoosh of orange heat as Luckas slammed his first strike into Oakes’s front line. Dust and loose flakes of old lime mortar rained down from the ceiling arch onto the backs of our necks.

Kaelen didn’t wait. He reached up with his right hand, jammed all four fingers into the first square mason hole four feet above the ice shelf, hooked his left toe onto a rough seam in the dressed limestone pier, and pulled himself off the ice like a cat climbing a barn wall.

I went two seconds behind him.

Without the Rune of Antiquity eating up my focus, I just used the heavy, stubborn grip in my fingers and shoulders. The limestone inside the first putlog hole was dry, rough, and freezing cold through my leather gauntlets. I wedged my left boot sideways into a gap where the mortar had rotted out between two foundation blocks, reached four feet to my right across the curve of the arch above the black rushing water, and shoved my right hand into the second square socket.

Halfway across the thirty-foot span, right above the deepest part of the rushing black channel, a heavy boom shook the whole bridge structure.

Up on the road directly over my head, Lyle had just released a massive blast of compressed wind while Luckas pushed back with a wall of superheated air. The stone arch vibrated hard enough to knock a fist-sized chunk of loose mortar out of the socket under my left hand.

My left boot skated off the wet stone seam.

For half a second, my feet swung out into the empty air four feet above the boiling black rapids, my whole weight hanging from the four fingers of my right hand jammed into a four-inch hole in the rock.

My right shoulder popped softly in its socket from the jerk, and the healed acid burn across my right palm stretched tight enough to sting like fire.

Ahead of me, Kaelen stopped on the fourth hole, twisting his neck to look back while hanging by one elbow.

I didn’t yell, and I didn’t look down at the water. I just swung my left leg back in toward the pier, kicked the iron crampon points under my heel hard into a crack in the limestone until the metal bit, and hauled my chest back up against the stone wall, shoving my left hand into the next socket down the line.

"Show-off," Kaelen breathed, already moving again toward the south bank.

Up on top of the bridge, things were getting loud.

As Kaelen and I dropped silently onto the narrow ice shelf beneath the south bank—ten feet behind Lyle’s back—we could hear the fight right above the stone lip.

Oakes had figured out three seconds into the clash that the person next to Luckas wasn’t me.

"That’s Valerius on the left!" Oakes shouted over the clatter of wood. "The Lieutenant isn’t on the bridge! Push through the girl before Elvit drops out of the trees! Garrick, crush that buckler!"

I scrambled up the snowy mud bank behind the south bridge abutment alongside Kaelen, keeping my head low until my eyes cleared the top of the stone parapet eight feet behind Lyle.

Up in the middle of the bridge, Luckas was fighting two men at once. He had dropped my spare sword into the slush and had both hands on his own longsword, the air around his shoulders shimmering with enough orange heat to turn the snow around his boots into ankle-deep brown mud as he held Oakes and Perrin back.

On the narrow three-foot strip of stone to Luckas’s left, Garrick—a third-year who outweighed Nia by sixty pounds—was trying to bull-rush her off the end of the bridge with his heavy oval shield.

Five weeks ago, Nia would have tried to hold her ground with her arms, gotten lifted off her feet, and ended up on her back in the slush.

This time, as Garrick threw all his weight into a heavy shield-bash aimed at her chest, Nia didn’t lock her knees.

She kept her eyes glued to his collarbone just like Kaelen had drilled into her head in the dark gravel pit. At the last inch, she punched the heavy iron boss of her twelve-inch buckler straight out at an angle against the wet wooden rim of his shield, pushed a crisp, controlled burst of mineral-fed heat into her hips, and pivoted cleanly to her right behind Luckas’s back—letting Garrick’s own momentum carry him skidding two steps past her on the greasy slush.

As Garrick stumbled forward and his shield swung wide to catch his balance against the stone parapet, Nia didn’t get greedy and try to swing for his chest. She just slid the chalked wooden point of her five-foot boar-spear forward with both hands like she was threading a needle and stamped a bright red stripe right across the outside of his unguarded right thigh, then hopped two steps back behind her iron buckler before he could swing his shortsword around.

"Leg hit!" the yellow-vested proctor on the bank shouted. "Right leg disabled on Garrick! Drop to one knee if you want to stay in play!"

Garrick cursed loudly, dropping his right knee into the freezing slush as the rules required, which immediately opened a three-foot hole on the left side of Oakes’s shield line.

"Lyle, blow her back!" Oakes roared, trying to shift his shield over to cover his kneeling teammate. "Clear the left wall!"

Lyle took a deep breath at the back of the bridge, raising both hands to send a gale-force blast of compressed air straight into Nia’s face while she was recovering her stance.

He never got his hands all the way up.

Kaelen vaulted silently over the south stone parapet right behind Lyle’s left shoulder, landed with both boots in the slush without sliding an inch, and tapped two red-chalked wooden daggers in a neat X across the back of the wind-mage’s collar before Lyle even knew anyone had climbed out of the creek.

"Lyle is dead!" the proctor yelled from the bank, waving his red flag. "Sit down, Cadet!"

Lyle jumped a foot in the air, spun around to see Kaelen standing behind him, and let out a strangled groan before sitting down in the snow with his hands on his head.

Oakes heard the proctor’s shout and tried to turn his head inside his padded helmet to look behind him.

I didn’t give him time to turn around.

I came over the stone wall three paces behind Kaelen, scooped up the spare wooden bastard sword Luckas had dropped at the edge of the slush, and hit the back of Perrin’s shield line at a full run while Luckas surged forward from the front with a blinding flare of heat that forced Oakes to raise his shield over his eyes.

Caught between Luckas’s hot blade in front and me coming in behind his shoulder, Perrin didn’t have anywhere to move his feet on the twelve-foot arch. I hooked the toe of my iron-cramponed boot behind his left heel, shoved my shoulder hard into the back of his padded vest to send him sprawling harmlessly into the snow beside Lyle, and brought the chalked edge of the wooden sword down across the back of Oakes’s shoulder blade half a second before Luckas’s blade tapped the front of his shield.

The proctor blew two long, shrill blasts on his brass whistle.

"Match!" the proctor shouted, checking his pocket watch. "Three defenders eliminated! Time: four minutes, twelve seconds! Winner: First-Year Squad Seven!"

For a second, nobody on the bridge moved except the steam rising off our wet wool coats into the cold morning air.

Then Oakes lowered his heavy wooden shield, looked back over his shoulder at me and Kaelen standing on the dry south side of his line with ice water dripping off our boots and trousers, and looked down at the twelve-foot drop to the rushing creek below the parapet.

"You climbed the pier sockets?" Oakes asked, his chest heaving as he pulled off his padded cap and wiped sweat off his forehead.

"Your shield wall was too wide to walk through," I said, lowering the wooden sword and shaking a clump of grey slush off my sleeve. "Seemed rude to interrupt."

Oakes stared at me for a moment, then let out a short, barking laugh and shook his head, reaching down to help Garrick up out of the puddle. "Fair enough, First-Year. Go get dry before your boots freeze to your toes. If you pull that against Redgrave on Wednesday, make sure you watch his archer—he likes to bounce iron-tipped shafts off the rocks."

Nia walked across the bridge toward us, resting her short boar-spear on her shoulder. Her cheeks were bright pink from the cold and her wet curls were sticking out from under her cap, though she was grinning so wide she looked ten years old.

"Did you see the shield slide?" she asked me as soon as she got within reach, holding up her small iron buckler to show a deep white gouge in the iron boss where Garrick’s heavy shield rim had hit it. "I didn’t even burn my thumb! He slid right past me like he was on greased lard!"

"Your back foot was still two inches too wide when you jabbed his leg," Kaelen said as he walked past her toward the gate trail, though he reached out with one wet glove and tapped the top of her padded cap once on the way by. "Good timing on the poke, though."

Luckas slung his wooden sword over his shoulder and fell in beside me as we started the long walk back up the snowy hill toward the bathhouse stoves, where the smoke was rising thick and grey into the winter sky.

"Duke Ramiro actually put his brandy flask down for ten seconds when you two popped up behind the wall," Luckas said quietly, glancing up toward the green curtains of the viewing pavilion as we passed the staging yard. "And Lord Lorenzo wrote something down in a little red book."

"Let them write," I said, my right palm throbbing faintly under my wet glove from hanging off the bridge stone. "We have three more rounds before anyone packs a bag for the mountains, and right now I can’t feel my left knee. First one back to the bathhouse gets the hot water tap."