Castellan Lebbick appeared to be in a completely different mood. If he felt any desire to rage, he didn’t show it. From the battlements above the gate, he watched the massive Alend ram at work with a twisted expression on his face, as if something inside him were being torn; yet he didn’t so much as raise his voice or curse. He didn’t even grin. For no very clear reason, he muttered in disgust words that sounded to the guards around him like, “Fool woman.” Then he called for ropes and began mustering men to fight for the gates.
He didn’t stay to watch the struggle, however. A number of his captains knew what to do in a situation like this. Wandering away like a shadow of the man he used to be, he went to spend as much of the night as possible drinking with Artagel.
Unfortunately, ale – even in that quantity – did nothing to quench the hot, dry sensation in his mind. He was full of foreboding; his brain chewed anticipations of disaster. So he was grimly amazed when he woke up the next morning and learned that something good was happening.
It was raining.
A hard rain, so thick that it blinded the castle and turned the dirt of the courtyard into immediate soup; what the people where Lebbick had grown up called a real gully-washer. And long overdue: Mordant expected rain like this in the spring.
Of course, it made Orison impossible to defend. The guards above the gates wouldn’t have known if the entire Alend army had come within a stone’s throw of their noses.
On the other hand, the rain also made attack impossible.
The Alends had no footing. They could bring up battering rams until they broke their hearts; but they couldn’t swing them effectively. The gates would stand forever against any pounding they might receive in this rain. And other siege engines were equally useless.
The rain didn’t cheer Castellan Lebbick up. He was past the point where anything could have cheered him. But it did give him a breathing space, a bit of time in which to get a better grip on himself.
It also helped Terisa and Geraden.
That surprised her. She got so wet and so cold so quickly that she felt defeated before the day had well begun. She soon realized, however, that she and Geraden were in next to no danger of being spotted or captured through this downpour. If she had let him get more than ten feet away, she wouldn’t have been able to spot him herself.
Now the trick had nothing to do with being stopped. The trick was to know where they were going.
“How do you know we’re not lost?” she shouted into the deluge.
“The rain!” Despite the water streaming down his face, he grinned. “At this time of year, it always comes from the west! We’re going south, so all we have to do is cut across the wind!”
She would have been impressed if her whole body hadn’t felt so miserable.
Nevertheless she kept going; she and Geraden kept each other going. While their enemies were blinded was the best time for them to go forward. The rain might make it impossible for Torrent to follow her mother; but Terisa was too cold and soaked to worry about something that far out of her control. She concentrated solely on Geraden and motion until the storm finally blew away an hour or two before sunset, and he had an opportunity to find his bearings.
“Tomorrow.” There was relief in his voice; yet she had never heard him sound so tired. “We’ll be in the Demesne tomorrow morning. Tomorrow afternoon or evening we’ll reach Orison.”
Just for something to say, she muttered, “If Prince Kragen doesn’t give me some dry clothes, I’m going to spit right in his face.”
Geraden nodded his approval. “Just don’t kick him. I’ve heard princes tend to get cranky when they’re kicked.”
“I don’t care,” she retorted. “I’ve been on a horse for as long as I can remember, and my whole body hurts. I’m going to kick anybody I want.”
Again, he nodded. “You may have to.” It was obvious that his thoughts were elsewhere. “We’ve been carrying a lot of questions around for a long time. Tomorrow we’ll start getting answers. You may have to kick everybody we meet.”
Terisa refused to worry about that. All she wanted at the moment was to be warm and dry.
The inhabitants of Orison had the opposite reaction: they prayed for more rain.
Unluckily, they didn’t get it. By the next morning, the ground was dry enough for Prince Kragen to resume his attack.
The mud was still thick: a sea of it surrounded Orison. But decades or centuries of use had packed the roadbed hard; it gave the Alends enough footing to put some heft into the swing of their ram.
Protected by shields and shells, nearly a thousand men edged close to the walls to ward the ram as it hammered the gates. Every blow seemed to carry through the stone to the tops of the towers, the bottoms of the dungeons.
In response, Castellan Lebbick’s guards cranked up mangonels powerful enough to dent iron and splinter wood. The mangonels shattered Alend shields almost effortlessly, reduced the flesh under the shields to pulp and crushed bone. Lebbick didn’t have many of the ponderous crossbows, however. And his men had to fire scores of lead bolts in order to damage the shell protecting the ram.
Slowly, inevitably, one blow at a time, the gates began to fail.
The wood started to compress and crack; stress showed along the iron strutwork; mortar sifted from between the stones which held the gates in the wall; bolts began to work loose.
At the moment, Prince Kragen was paying for this success with dozens and then hundreds of his men. Inside the castle, Orison’s defenders suffered no losses. But that imbalance would shift as soon as the gates broke.
“Tomorrow,” Lebbick muttered, inspecting their timbers with an expert eye. “Those shitlickers’ll be in here tomorrow. We’ve got that long to live.”
He didn’t sound upset. He didn’t even sound angry.
He sounded satisfied.
Dutifully, he sent a report to King Joyse. Then he reduced Orison’s defenders to a minimum. Every guard who could be spared he ordered away to spend as much time as possible with whatever friends or family the man had left.
His wife would have approved of that.
Amiably, Artagel asked him, “What do you suppose King Joyse will do to save us?”
Entirely without warning, Castellan Lebbick recovered his rage. “The way our luck’s going” – he was clenching his teeth so hard his forehead felt like it might crack – “he’ll challenge Prince fornicating Kragen to a duel.”
With fury crackling in every muscle, he left the gates and the courtyard. While he was angry, at least, he couldn’t bear to watch what was happening.
Like the Prince, he had no way of knowing that Terisa and Geraden were already in the Demesne.
Late that afternoon, they rode as if they were fearless straight up to the first Alend patrol they met and demanded to be taken to the lady Elega.
Swords and distrust surrounded them promptly. Terisa’s mount showed a distressing inclination to shy in all directions; she had to fight to keep the beast under control. She was conscious that the weather had turned chilly since the previous day’s rain. Alends? she wondered. Not Cadwals? Does that mean Orison is still standing? But she had no intention of asking those questions aloud. After all, these soldiers were dressed and armored just like the men who had taken Queen Madin.
The leader of the patrol snapped, “What makes pigslop like you two think you’ve got a reason to see the Prince’s lady?”
Geraden’s mouth smiled, but his eyes were hard. “We’re servants,” he answered with a hint of danger in his voice. “Our parents have served her family since before we were born. We grew up with her.
“We’ve come from Romish. The Queen sent us to see her.”
The Alend leader snarled a curse. “The Queen? Madin, that shithole Joyse’s wife?”