That almost made Torrent smile.
Alone, she rode out of the hollow on the trail of Queen Madin’s abductors.
Terisa put the best tourniquet she could manage on the wounded man’s shoulder. Gritting his teeth, Geraden slapped a measure of sense into the Queen’s whimpering servant, then instructed him to make sure the Fayle’s man reached Romish.
After that, they selected the two best horses, packed a third to carry their supplies, and started toward the Demesne and Orison.
THIRTY-SEVEN: POISED FOR VICTORY
The Alend army didn’t move.
It hadn’t moved for days.
Oh, Prince Kragen kept his men busy enough: he was determined to be ready for anything. But he didn’t waste another catapult; didn’t risk any kind of sortie, much less a massed assault; didn’t make anything more than covert efforts to spy on the castle. In fact, the only thing he apparently did to advance his siege was to completely prevent anyone from getting into or out of Orison: he cut King Joyse off from any conceivable source of news. Other than that, he and his forces might as well have been engaged in training exercises.
He was busy in other ways, of course. For instance, he had quite a number of men out at all times, furtively searching for some sign of the Congery’s champion. Knowing what the champion had done to Orison, Prince Kragen felt a positive dislike for the prospect of being attacked from behind by that lone fighter. In addition, he spent quite a bit of time, both alone and with his father, trying to fathom King Joyse’s daughters.
But King Joyse’s warnings haunted him – and Master Quillon’s. He took no direct action to hasten the fall of Orison.
That changed during the night which Terisa and Geraden had spent with Queen Madin.
Naturally, Prince Kragen had no way of knowing where Terisa and Geraden were. He couldn’t know that they had ever left Orison – or that Mordant’s need was coming to a crisis around him.
On the other hand, he was alert to every outward sign of what was happening in the castle.
When the men who had the duty of watching the ramparts more closely after dark reported to him that they heard shouts and turmoil, saw lights in the vicinity of the curtain-wall, he didn’t hesitate: he sent half a dozen hand-picked scouts to creep as near to the wall as possible, climb it if necessary, and find out what was going on.
The news they brought back tightened excitement or dread around his heart.
There was a riot taking place on the other side of the curtain-wall.
Apparently, the overcrowded and raw-nerved populace of Orison was breaking into active rebellion against Castellan Lebbick.
After a while, the noise receded, as if the riot were moving into the main body of the castle. But light continued to show at the rim of the wall, blazing up in gusts like a fire out of control. And when dawn came the Prince saw dirty plumes of smoke curling upward from the wound in Orison’s side, giving the castle a look of death it hadn’t had since the day the champion had first injured it.
Again, Prince Kragen didn’t hesitate: he had spent the night preparing his response. At his signal, fifty men carrying a battering ram in a protective frame ran forward to try the gates. The walls and roof which received the arrows of the defenders made the ram look as unwieldy as a shed; but the use of the frame could be an effective tactic, as long as the gate failed before the defenders had time to ready a counterattack – or as long as they were distracted by trouble elsewhere.
As a distraction, Prince Kragen sent several hundred soldiers with storming ladders and grappling hooks to assail the curtain-wall.
Unfortunately, Orison’s guards proved equal to the occasion. A tub of lamp oil and a burning fagot turned the ram’s protective frame into a charnel. And the Castellan – or whoever had taken command after the riot – had obviously expected the attack on the curtain-wall; so the defense there had been reinforced.
When Prince Kragen saw that his men were taking more than their share of losses and getting nowhere, he chewed his moustache, swore, and shook his fists at the sky – all inwardly, in the privacy of his thoughts, so that no one witnessed his frustration. Then he ordered a withdrawal.
Rather tentatively, as if sensing the Prince’s state, one of his captains commented, “Well, they have to run out of oil sometime.”
Prince Kragen swore again – out loud, this time. Then he instructed the captain to begin raiding the surrounding villages and trees for wood: he wanted more battering rams, more protective frames. And while that raid was underway, he set about using up the rams and frames he already had.
If the defenders had left any of the battering rams he now sent against them alone, they would have soon learned that none of the rams had enough men with it to actually threaten the gates. This time, however – for once! – his tactics succeeded. The defenders faithfully burned every ram and frame to charcoal.
The Prince grinned grimly under his moustache. Apparently, Castellan Lebbick – or whoever had replaced him after the riot – was still human enough to be outwitted once in a while.
The riot which had taken place in Orison that night was an ugly one. It had a number of excuses. The castle was indeed overcrowded, badly so – a detail which became increasingly onerous for everyone as the siege wore on. And of course the siege had come at the end of a hard winter, before spring could do anybody any good; so supplies were relatively short, and everything from food and water to blankets and space was strictly – a swelling number of people said harshly – rationed. By Castellan Lebbick, naturally. Despite Master Eremis’ heroic replenishment of the reservoir.
And Orison’s surplus population had nothing to do. Nobody really had anything to do. As long as the Alend army just sat there with all their heads crammed up the Prince’s ass – as one tired old guard put it – nobody had any outlet for long days of pent-up fear.
Why didn’t Prince Kragen do something?
Where was High King Festten?
For that matter, where was the Perdon?
How much longer was this going to go on?
Tempers grew ragged; hostility fed on frustration and uselessness; grievances multiplied in all directions. Orison’s sewers kept backing up because the drainfields weren’t adequate to the population. And the leaders of Orison, the men in command – King Joyse, Castellan Lebbick, Master Barsonage – did nothing to ease the pressure. They all went about their lives in isolation, as if the burgeoning misery sealed within these walls were immaterial to them. Even the castle’s most comfortable inhabitants – men of position, women of privilege – were in an ugly mood; and the ugliness was spreading.
But even ugliness couldn’t function in a vacuum: it needed a focus, a target.
It needed the Castellan.
He would have been a likely candidate in any case. After all, the responsibility for deciding and implementing Orison’s distress was on his shoulders. Merchants and farmers had time to become bitter about the confiscation of their goods. Mothers with sick children had cause to complain about the rationing of medicines. People with a normal need for activity – and privacy – didn’t have anyone else to blame for the lack of those necessities.
The guards, however, were loyal to their commander. Most of them had had years to become familiar with his loyalties – to them as well as to King Joyse. And they were accustomed to taking his orders. One way or another, they worked to control the pressure building against the Castellan.
As a result, there was no riot – no outbreak of resentment – until someone threw a spark into the tinder of Orison’s mood.
That someone was Saddith.
She was on her feet now, able to get around. Despite the loss of a few teeth, and the rather dramatic damage done to the rest of her face, she was able to talk. And that was what she had been doing ever since she had healed enough to climb out of her sickbed: getting around; talking.