Jehannes shook his head. ‘If you are wrong-’
The captain slammed his fist on the table. ‘When, exactly, have I been wrong? I’ve done a pretty damn good job here, and we’ve gone from victory to victory – even when we stumble. We’re still standing, at odds of twenty to one.’ He looked around. ‘Our magazines are full. Our casualties are acceptable. At this rate, if the worst happens,’ he realised he was growing too angry to sway them but his words were tumbling out, ‘then we’ll lose the siege engines tonight, but it will be four more days before he storms the Bridge Castle, it will cost him a thousand creatures to take it. And he still won’t have a chance to take this fortress!’
Ser Milus snorted. ‘I think you just condemned my garrison to death.’
The captain shrugged. ‘I’ll go and command the Bridge Castle and you can command here. This is war. We are not losing. Why are any of you considering surrender?’
Jehannes swallowed heavily.
‘Speak!’ the captain insisted. ‘Why are you all so silent?’
Amicia said quietly, ‘Your eyes are glowing red.’
The Abbess snorted. ‘Every young man would have glowing red eyes, if they only could.’ She got up. ‘But I agree with you, wholeheartedly, Captain. We will have no more talk of truce, surrender, or accommodation. The Wild will kill us if they penetrate these walls.’ She raised her staff. She appeared to grow. Not taller, nor more beautiful, nor younger, and yet, in that moment, she was greater than any of them.
‘Do not be weak, my friends.’ She smiled, and her smile had the warmth of the sun. ‘We are strongest, we mere humans, when we unite. Together we can resist. As individuals – we are no stronger than our weakest.’
She diminished, and sat.
Harmodius sat silent.
Ser Milus leaned forward. ‘Captain,’ he said.
‘Aye, messire?’
‘I agree. He’ll go for us next. Bolster the garrison. Give me fresh troops and more men-at-arms and I’ll hold it a week.’ He nodded.
The captain subsided into his seat. ‘Excellent thought. Take them tonight, when you go back – as soon as ever you can.’
Harmodius shook his head. ‘I still think he is too intelligent for all of us, even if we could all cast in concert.’ He rolled his shoulders like a North Country wrestler preparing for a match. ‘But I’m game. And I admit that the captain has a point. We don’t have to defeat him, only make it look as if he can be beaten.’
The Abbess smiled. ‘Well said. This is the kind of company I love. Let dinner be served.’
The dinner was not rich. There was no roast swan, no peacocks with gilded beaks, no larks tongues. Duels between torsion engines had killed a dozen sheep on the ridge so every mess in the fortress was eating mutton, and they were no exception.
The venison sausage was superb, though, and the wines were as ancient as human possession of the fortress.
The conversation was slow to start but by the second cup of wine, Mag was amused by Tom’s ribald story, and Johne the Bailli roared with laughter at the tale of the student and the hornsmith’s wife. He told one of his own, about a bad priest who disgraced his vows, and Father Henry glared.
The Abbess passed wine. She had the captain on her right, and Amicia on her left. When the talk had become general, she turned to the captain. ‘You have my permission to engage her in conversation,’ she said.
The captain tried to smile. ‘I’m not sure my eyes aren’t still glowing,’ he said.
‘Anger and lust are different sins,’ said the Abbess. ‘Amicia is going to take holy orders, Captain. You should congratulate her.’
‘She has my fullest congratulations. She will make a remarkable nun, and in time, I expect she will make a remarkable Abbess.’ He sipped his wine.
‘She is not for you,’ the Abbess said, but without rancour.
‘So you keep telling me, while dangling her like a tourney prize.’ He took a bite of meat. His tension was only visible in the force he used to cut the mutton.
‘I’m right here,’ Amicia said.
He smiled at her.
‘Once again, you bite her with your eyes.’ The Abbess shook her head.
After dinner, the Abbess held the magi back. Mag was surprised to be invited. ‘My working is very slow,’ she said. ‘I never even know-’ She shrugged.
Amicia put a hand on the seamstress’s shoulder. ‘I can feel every stitch you sew,’ she said.
Harmodius snorted. ‘You share a mixing of gold and green,’ he said. ‘I should have come to this place years ago to have all my notions of Hermetics shattered.
The Abbess said, ‘It is my will that we should stand in a circle, and link.’
Harmodius winced. ‘I’m granting my secrets to every woman in the room!’
‘You have little time for mere women,’ Amicia snapped at him. ‘We’re too patient in our castings, are we not?’
‘Women are all very well for healing,’ Harmodius said.
Amicia raised her head, and a sphere of golden green sat in it. She projected it to a point roughly halfway between herself and Harmodius.
‘Try me,’ she said.
The captain was surprised by her vehemence.
The Abbess, on the other hand, merely smiled a cat’s smile.
Harmodius shrugged and slapped at the sphere with a fist of phantasm.
It moved the width of a finger.
Then it shot across the room at Harmodius. He caught it, struggled with it, and it began to move – slowly, but without pause – back.
‘Of course he is stronger than you,’ the Abbess said, and she extinguished the globe with a snap of her fingers. ‘But not as much stronger as he would have expected. Eh, Magus?’
Harmodius took a deep breath. ‘You are most powerful, sister.’
The captain grinned. ‘Let us link. I reserve some memories. But my tutor taught me to hold some walls while opening other doors.’
‘I give a great deal for very little gain,’ Harmodius said. ‘Bah – and yet, the Abbess is right. I am not an island.’ He extended his hand to Amicia.
She took it graciously. They took hands around the circle, like children in a game.
‘Captain, I intend to pray. Try not to vanish in a puff of smoke,’ said the Abbess.
She began the Lord’s Prayer.
Prudentia was standing at the door. ‘If you were having guests, you might have asked me to sweep up,’ she said.
The Abbess appeared in his hall. She was young, voluptuous in a tall, thin way, with an earthy power to her face that belied her spirit.
Amicia was elfin and green.
Harmodius was young and strong, hale – a knight on errantry, with a halo of gold.
Miram was shining like a statue of polished bronze.
Mag looked just like herself.
He was at once in his place of power, and simultaneously in Amicia’s, standing on her beautiful bridge. He sat in a comfortable leather armchair in a great tiled room – that had to be Harmodius – surrounded by chess boards and wheels with wheels. He stood in a chapel surrounded by statues of knights and their ladies – or, as he realised, ladies and their knights, each with a golden chain attaching them. A chapel of courtly love – surely the lady’s place of power. He knelt before a plain stone altar with a cup of red blood on it. Miram’s place of power.
He stood in the Abbess’s hall, and there was a needle in his hand. Mag’s place of power was external – in that moment, he understood how very powerful her making was, because where the rest of them worked the aether, she worked the solid.
There was a glow or health, of vitality, of goodness, of power. And no time at all.
He knew many things, and many things of his were learned.
They made their plan.
And then, like the end of a kiss, he was himself.
He sagged away from them, tired from the length of the link. Other perspectives were haunting, exhausting – he could see, as quickly as Harmodius had, how a sisterhood of dedicated nuns was the ideal basis for a choir of Hermeticists, because they learned and practised discipline – together.