Yet despite it all, he could not shake the doubt that clung to his chest, gnawing.
CHAPTER 3
It was dusk, and Patrick DuTaureau was busy demonstrating to a group of youngsters how best to parry a sidelong chop. They practiced in a small field to the left of Celestia’s giant tree, where Mordeina’s outer-wall gate had been smashed by Karak’s fireball from the sky. The gate on the inner wall, positioned seventy feet to the right of its demolished sister, was still intact. They’d been at it for over an hour when the muted sound of a blaring horn sounded. His students were young, greener than grass in the middle of summer, and their reaction to the horn showed just how green they were. They dropped their practice sticks to their sides and glanced around, confused.
To Patrick, though, its meaning was clear, its sound painfully familiar. Karak’s Army was launching another attack.
Someone tugged on his shirtsleeve, and Patrick glanced down to see one of his students staring at him, eyes bulging with fear. The boy was no older than twelve, and stocky, with red-blond hair and dark freckles. The rough-spun shift covering him was filthy, appearing to be splotchy black in the murk of the setting sun. He was the only of his class who remained; the others had already fled away from the wall, most likely searching for someplace to hide.
“Mister Patrick, what do I do?” the boy asked, his voice quavering.
Patrick knelt down, the hump in his back sending shooting pain up his spine and his knees popping. “Vinsen,” he said, “have you been practicing your archery like you were supposed to?”
The boy nodded.
“How many targets did you hit this morning?”
“Six.”
“Out of how many?”
Vinsen’s lips curled up, and his brow furrowed in thought, before he replied, “Thirty.”
Patrick let out a deep sigh. No way good enough, but it will have to do.
“Go there,” he said, pointing through a gap in the rushing bodies to where one of the Wardens stood behind a stone barricade at the base of a hill, handing out recently strung bows and quivers filled with crudely fletched arrows. “Grab a bow and join the others on the line. You will be our last defense. If Karak’s bastards get through. . ”
“Put an arrow in them?” asked Vinsen, a blank look on his face.
“Yes, that would be better than dying. Now go.”
Patrick rustled the boy’s hair, and Vinsen sprinted off through the throng of dirty and scampering people. Patrick ran in the opposite direction. His every muscle ached, and his misshapen head throbbed. The burgeoning evening was cool, and without his armor on, his light clothing did little to protect him from the onset of cold, making him shiver. For the millionth time in his life, he wondered why he, the son of Ashhur’s first daughter Isabel, should feel so much pain. What good was agelessness if each day was filled with physical torment? It just didn’t seem fair.
Blame your father, the voice of his inner hatred said. He made you this way, so heap that responsibility on his head.
He shook off his impure thoughts and hurried behind a group of five Wardens climbing one of the slender stairways. The Wardens were each a full head taller than him, and their long, elegant legs were able to scale two steps at a time. In a matter of moments, they were far above him, nearing the top of the wall, while those behind Patrick urged him to pick up the pace. At one point he nearly lost his balance and fell, but he righted himself just as he was about to slip off the edge, even as bodies collided with his backside.
Amazingly, he realized that was the first time his heart rate had risen above normal since the horn started blaring. Falling and breaking my neck scares me, but the possibility of death by sword doesn’t? He shook his head. Something isn’t right in this head of mine.
Once he reached the top of the wall, that fear finally came. He gazed across the valley at the army Karak had massed a mile away. The countless soldiers were like some black disease that had momentarily stagnated, hovering there atop a distant hill, seemingly still in the dimness, yet buzzing with frenetic energy. Patrick was so focused on the sight of them that he almost stepped off the plank connecting the inner wall with the outer. If not for one of the thick limbs of Celestia’s tree, which extended out over the plank, he would have fallen.
When he reached the ramparts of the outer wall, all frenetic energy seemed to die, and his nerves settled. Warden and human alike were behind the parapets, with bows at the ready, peering between merlons at the valley below, a sight that even a few short days ago would have seemed impossible. Warden Judarius had joined Karak’s former soldier Preston Ender in preparing the settlement’s defenses, and the discipline they inspired was a sight to behold. There had to be ninety individuals on the wall, and none of them so much as breathed or shook or whimpered, even when the warhorn sounded once more. Judarius paced behind them, pleading for calm, his long black hair bouncing with every step he took. It was a display of restraint, of order, that would have made even Karak proud. Patrick shuddered at the thought.
He placed his hand on the shoulder of a sandy-haired teen wearing tattered breeches. The youngster glanced behind him, visibly started as he gazed at Patrick’s ugliness, and then dutifully stepped aside. Patrick sighed and leaned between two merlons, peering at the dead land below him, squinting to adjust his eyes to the coming darkness. He heard the whine of wood scraping against metal as he watched a mobile mountain slowly approaching. It was more than halfway between the awaiting army and the protective wall, flanked on either side by at least a hundred armored men who marched with their curved shields raised high. The wheeled tower they guarded was nearly as high as the wall itself. Soldiers stood atop it, hiding behind shields as Karak’s banners fluttered above their heads. Patrick reached over his shoulder and behind his back, but his hand grasped at nothing. He wore no armor, and he’d given his massive sword, Winterbone, to one of the new, young stable hands for safekeeping when he’d begun his lessons. Stupid, he thought. Stupid, foolish Patrick.
The warhorn blew again, and the siege tower rolled ever closer.
“I’d give my left nut for a bow and quiver,” he called out, not taking his eyes off the approaching death tower, and a few moments later one was handed to him. He nocked an arrow and leveled it, feeling how unsteady the bow felt in his grip. Although he was a natural with a sword, he was a less than proficient archer, perhaps no better than even young Vinsen. He closed his eyes. Ashhur, please let at least one of my arrows find purchase in the flesh of my enemy. The contradiction of his prayer was not lost on him.
Someone nudged him, and Patrick glanced to his right to see Preston Ender there, grinning at him, his bowstring lax. The older man’s gray eyes twinkled in the coming darkness, his peppered hair and beard trimmed and proper. In that moment he looked like a stately version of his deceased brother, Corton, who had taught Patrick how to wield a sword in the swamps of Haven. Preston’s armor, which had once been black and adorned with Karak’s roaring lion, was now a shade of off-white, cured in an acidic mixture and repainted to show the man’s new allegiance to Ashhur. He had even stenciled a crude mountain to replace the old sigil on his breastplate. Preston and his band of seven young warriors, all formerly soldiers in Karak’s Army, had been lovingly dubbed the Turncloaks by their fellow defenders on the wall.
“Something amusing about all this?” asked Patrick.
Preston chuckled. “Of course. You don’t see it?”
“See what?”