Chapter 269: Rivers of Blood

Chapter 269: Chapter 269: Rivers of Blood

The field was quiet for eleven minutes.

It was the longest eleven minutes of Rowan’s life. He stayed on the ridge with his hand pressed to the earth, feeling for movement, while the rising sun climbed the sky and the long, silver-green grass of the killing ground lay still. Below, the Court and the Deepwatch drew back to a ragged line half a mile from the hill, tending their wounded and hauling their dead. No horns sounded. No banners moved. The only sound was the thin, rhythmic scrape of shovels, a dozen of the enemy digging graves at the edge of the marsh.

"They’re regrouping," said Caelen, from the rampart.

"Yes."

"They will not cross that ground again."

"No."

"So they will find another way."

"I know." Rowan did not lift his head. "That’s what worries me."

Behind him, along the wall, the hundred held their positions in grim, exhausted silence. Seraphina’s clerics moved among them with water and bandages. Barney was repairing a crack in the stone with his bare hands, heat rolling from his bracers in shimmering waves. Mirei crouched on the highest bastion with her bow across her knees, her eyes never leaving the enemy line. Clara sat on an upturned crate with her sketch spread across her lap, whispering numbers to herself.

And in the middle of it all, ten paces from Rowan, Odalys Fenn stood very still.

She was staring at the ground where the spikes had risen. She had not spoken since the first screams. Her frost-pale eyes were fixed on a single dark patch of earth near the edge of the grass, where a Court warrior had fallen, and the soil had drunk his blood.

"Reeve?" said Rowan, softly.

"The blood," she said.

"What about it?"

"It is not drying."

He looked.

She was right.

All across the killing ground, in a wide, ragged scatter, dark stains lay on the grass where the Court’s fallen had been. Some had soaked into the soil. Some had pooled in the hollows between the roots. But they were not drying. They glistened, wet and red, in the morning light, far too bright, far too fresh, and as Rowan watched, one of the larger pools gave a small, sudden shiver.

It rose.

It lifted out of the grass in a thin, glittering thread, as though pulled by an invisible hand, and hung in the air, trembling. Then another rose beside it. And another. Hundreds of them, from every corner of the field, drifting upward in slow, shimmering ribbons, red as rubies in the sun.

"Rowan," said Odalys, in a thin, strained voice. "Rowan."

"I see it."

"That is not the Court."

"No."

"That is the Deepwatch."

He turned his head, very slowly, toward the river.

A woman was standing at the edge of the shallows.

She was perhaps thirty, tall and pale and impossibly thin, in a long, tattered gown the color of old wine. Her hair hung to her waist, black and sleek and glistening, and her skin had the translucent, bloodless sheen of a candle. Her eyes were red. Not the red of rage or fever, but a deep, clear, steady crimson, as though someone had poured wine into water. She stood with her bare feet in the river and her arms spread wide, and the ribbons of blood rose around her in a slow, graceful spiral, like smoke from an altar.

She was smiling.

"Ysolde Thrane," said Odalys, quietly. "I heard the name from my scouts. Level forty-eight. The Deepwatch calls her the Red Tide." She swallowed. "I did not think it was real."

"What is she?"

"A blood-caller. A master of the element. They say she can pull the blood from a body at a hundred paces." Her voice cracked. "They say she does not need to touch you."

Rowan went cold.

He understood, all at once, why the Deepwatch had pulled back. Not from fear. They had been waiting. Waiting for the soil to drink. Waiting for the field to fill with what she needed. The spikes had given her more than a lesson. They had given her ammunition.

"Everyone down!" he shouted. "Get down!"

The first spear came out of the sky like a thrown star.

It was perhaps ten feet long, thin as a lance, red as fresh paint. It did not fly in a straight line. It curved, in a long, graceful arc, over the top of the rampart and down into the dust behind it, where a young man with a Confederation coat and a shovel had just stood up from a trench. He had time to turn his head.

The spear took him in the chest.

It passed through him and through the wall of packed clay behind him, and when it burst, it burst like a fruit, in a spray of red mist that sprayed twenty feet across the dust. He fell without a sound.

"Spears!" screamed someone. "Blood spears!"

Then they were all coming.

They rose from the field in a hundred slender, glittering shafts, each one a different length, each one trailing a thin, scarlet ribbon. They arced over the rampart in a wide, rippling fan, and where they came down, they did not stop at stone, or clay, or thorn. They went through. They bent around the shield wall. They slid through the cracks between rocks. They curled around the edge of Barney’s raised shield and struck the man behind it.

The hill erupted in screams.

Rowan threw himself flat. A spear hissed over his shoulder, so close that he felt its cold breath on the back of his neck, and buried itself in the earth three feet away. It quivered there for a moment, glistening. Then it collapsed into a spreading pool of dark, wet red.

"Shields up! Shields up!" Caelen’s voice rang across the rampart, harsh and clear. "Clerics, to the left! Water wing, form on me! Barney!"

"On it!" roared Barney, and the great tower shield swung wide, a wall of black iron against the red rain.

But the damage was already done.

They had been repairing the notch.

That was the cruelest part. A gap in the western wall, a narrow, ragged crack where the clay had slumped in the night, had needed filling, and a half-dozen of Rowan’s best earth-workers had been crouched in it, patching it with fresh stone. They had been doing exactly what he told them to do. Working quietly, in the shadow of the rampart, where the spikes had made them feel safe.

Rowan heard it happen. He did not see it. He heard a long, ripping, wet sound, like a sheet of canvas torn in half, and then a chorus of cries that rose, and broke, and fell silent all at once.

He was on his feet before he knew he had moved.

"No!"

He reached the notch in six strides.

The wall had held. That was the first thing he saw, absurdly. The clay was whole. The stone was whole. But the dust behind it, the narrow, sheltered strip where six people had been working a moment ago, was a ruin of scarlet.

They lay in a loose ring, their tools still in their hands.

Jonas Aunins, the taller of the two Baltic brothers, lay on his back with his eyes wide open and a spear of blood still standing from his chest. He had not even had time to look surprised. His brother, Matis, knelt beside him, gripping his hand with both of his own, saying something in rapid, broken Baltic, over and over, in a high, thin, wondering voice, as though if he only said it enough times, it would take.

A girl Rowan did not know, nineteen, perhaps, with a long black braid, had fallen across a heap of stones with her arms outflung. Beside her, a bearded man in the grease-stained coat of a smith lay curled on his side. A little farther on, two more, a pair of friends who had been laughing together an hour before, lay close, almost touching, as if they had gone to sleep. And at the very edge of the notch, flat on her face in the dust, lay a slight, pale figure in a gray coat, with a pencil still clasped in her hand.

Rowan stopped.

It took him a moment to understand. Then he understood, and the world seemed to drop out from under his feet.

Katya.

She had been standing in the notch because he had told her to. You’re not here by accident, he had said. Remember that. She had been the one who felt the water under the ground. She had been the one who had told him where the old stream bed ran, three hours before, so that he could shore up the western slope.

He knelt, slowly, and turned her over.

Her eyes were closed. A faint, thin line of red ran from the corner of her mouth, and she did not breathe. She was eighteen. She was Level thirty-three. She had said, with a small, shy flush in her cheeks, Yes, boss.

"Rowan," said a voice. It was Seraphina’s. It was very close, and very quiet. "Rowan, she is gone. They are all gone."

"I know."

"I tried. I was too late."

"I know."

"Six," said Seraphina, and her voice cracked, just once. "Six of them. In a single volley."

He did not answer. He laid Katya’s hand gently across her chest, and closed his fingers around the pencil, and rose.

On the northern ridge, the marsh was burning.

Odalys Fenn knelt beside two bodies in the shadow of a ruined cairn, with her knife in one hand and her other pressed flat against a dead boy’s chest. Her face was still. She was not weeping. She was not speaking. She only knelt, with her frost-pale eyes fixed on a point somewhere far beyond the corpses, and her lips moved faintly.

They were Pell and Hesk. A trapper and a tracker. Twenty-three and twenty-six. They had crossed the marsh with her before dawn, with a dozen others, to set snares along the foot of the hill, and they had been in the open when the blood rose.

The spears had come for them first.

She had not seen it. She had heard it, a sharp, wet crack, like a branch breaking, and then silence. When she turned, there was nothing to see but two shapes on the grass, and a pair of long, red ribbons sinking slowly back into the earth.

"Reeve," said a rough, shaking voice at her shoulder. One of her trappers, a broad-shouldered man named Dov, stood a few paces away with his hands open at his sides. His face was gray. "Reeve, what do we do?"

She did not answer at once.

She was looking at Pell’s hand. It lay open on the grass, palm up, and in it was a small, carved bone charm, a snare-knot, the kind the children of the Homestead tied around their wrists for luck. He had made it himself. She remembered, absurdly, the day he had shown it to her, with a shy, proud grin. For the Wars, he had said. So it’ll hold.

"Reeve?"

"We hold," said Odalys.

Her voice was low and flat and dreadfully calm.

"We have two dead. We will have more. We do not stop." She rose, slowly, and tucked the charm into her belt. "Tell the others to fall back to the rocks. Cover. Quiet." Her eyes lifted to the river. "And find me the woman in the red gown."

Rowan did not remember crossing the hill.

He found himself standing at the crest of the rampart with the hoe in his hand and a hundred pairs of eyes on his back. The sun was high now, bright and hard and cruel. Across the killing ground, the survivors of the Court and the Deepwatch had formed a new line, tighter than before, with their shields raised against the sky. Between them, small and pale and impossibly calm, Ysolde Thrane stood in the shallows of the river with her red eyes lifted to the hill.

She was looking directly at him.

She smiled, and lifted one slender, trailing hand.

Behind her, the ribbons of blood rose again, a hundred, two hundred, a shimmering crimson wave that stretched from one end of the field to the other. They hung in the air like a forest of spears. They glittered. They waited.

"That’s six," said Rowan.

His voice was very quiet.

"And two on the Homestead’s side." He drew a long, slow breath. "Eight."

Beside him, Caelen did not speak. Barney was gripping his hammer so hard that the runes on his bracers flared. Mirei had risen on the bastion with an arrow nocked, her face white and set. Seraphina stood with both hands clenched, water swirling around her like a gathering storm.

"I should have seen it," said Rowan.

"You could not have known," said Seraphina.

"I should have."

"Rowan." It was Caelen. His voice was low and steady and dreadfully gentle. "You are not the Tower. You are not the Wars. You did not choose this."

"I chose to bring them."

"We all chose."

"They were children, Caelen. Katya was eighteen."

"I know."

He lifted his eyes to the field. And something in them had changed. The tiredness was still there, and the grief. But beneath them, deep and quiet and absolutely clear, there was something else, a thin, cold, burning thing, like a coal under ash.

What falls returns, he thought.

But not like this.

"Barney," he said.

"Boss."

"Raise every shield you’ve got. Everyone behind the wall, in the center. Nobody in the open. Nobody near the cracks." He lifted the hoe. "Seraphina. Can your water spirit counter the blood?"

She hesitated. "Possibly. The two elements are kin. If I can bind it, dilute it, break its tether..." She stopped. "I do not know. But I will try."

"Mirei."

"Yes."

"Can you hit her?"

Mirei looked across the field. The river shimmered in the sun. The pale woman stood in the shallows, three quarters of a mile away, with a hundred spears floating at her back.

"I can reach her," she said, very quietly. "I don’t know if I can kill her."

"Then reach her."

"Boss..."

"Reach her," said Rowan. His voice did not rise. "And Caelen."

"Yes."

"When she falls, I want you on that line. All of you. Everything." He turned, at last, and looked at them, one by one, at the four people who had walked beside him through twenty-eight floors, and twelve more, and a shaman’s drum. "Because I’m done being careful."

And far below, in the thin gold light of the morning, on a field of silver-green grass, the dead began, once more, to rise.