‘Sonia!’ Annocki cut in sharply.
Sonia fell silent, biting her lip. Rye met Dirk’s eyes, and quickly looked away again.
Annocki clasped her hands tightly, and took a deep breath.
‘Be still, Sonia, just for a moment,’ she went on in a calmer voice. ‘You have taken me completely by surprise. I have been very worried about you. I have hardly slept since you left. And now, suddenly, you come back, bringing three strangers with you, and—’
‘Indeed, we did not mean to intrude on your privacy, lady,’ Faene broke in, bright colour rising in her golden cheeks. ‘We had no idea Sonia was bringing us to you. Please do not trouble yourself—about me, at least. I am sure that Dirk can find me somewhere else to stay.’
Annocki blinked at her, clearly unable to believe that this well-spoken young woman was one of the crude, cruel barbarians she had been taught to fear.
Then suddenly she seemed to pull herself together. She moved quickly forward, and held out her hand to Faene.
‘Forgive me,’ she said, suddenly sounding far more human. ‘I did not mean to seem unwelcoming. My quarrel is only with Sonia, and I have become used to speaking to her very freely. We began as mistress and maid—’
‘Lady-in-waiting, if you please!’ Sonia protested.
Annocki sighed. ‘Lady-in-waiting, then. But that was a long time ago, and now we are like sisters despite the differences between us.’
‘Nocki has tried to civilise me, but I fear she has failed,’ Sonia said smugly.
‘So we have noticed,’ Dirk muttered.
Faene hesitated, then put out her own hand and allowed Annocki to take it.
‘I have known Sonia for days, not years,’ she said steadily, ‘but in that time she has been a true friend to me. I well understand what you have suffered, thinking you had lost her.’
‘I am sorry, Nocki—sorry you have been worried, I mean,’ Sonia put in. ‘But you knew I was determined to get through the Wall this time.’
‘Indeed.’ Annocki smiled wryly. ‘But I thought you would fail, as you have failed so often before. None of the other volunteers agreed to take you.’
‘No,’ Sonia said, with a resentful glance at Dirk, ‘but luckily Rye was different.’
‘Only because you blackmailed me,’ Rye retorted, feeling his face grow hot.
Sonia shrugged. ‘It had to be done. No one noticed that I was gone, did they, Nocki?’
Annocki shook her head. ‘As far as anyone knows, you have been here all along. I have tried my best to give that impression, and no one has challenged me.’
No one would dare, Rye thought, looking sideways at the young woman’s proud, closed face. Annocki was very tense, he could feel it, and she continually avoided her visitors’ eyes. He wondered uneasily how far she could be trusted.
Dirk was plainly wondering the same thing. He was looking warily around the room, very much on the alert.
Everyone jumped as there was a blare of trumpets from somewhere below. In a flash, Dirk had darted to the window and was looking down. Faene and Rye hurried to join him.
‘It is nothing—only the changing of the guard,’ Sonia said, raising her voice slightly as drums began to beat, making the panes of the window rattle. ‘It happens at this time every day.’
In the courtyard below, Keep soldiers were marching in a complicated pattern, the white feathers on their helmets bobbing. To one side, a small, plump figure in a plumed hat sat stiffly on a bored-looking black horse laden with red and gold trappings.
Rye fidgeted. He knew that if he had seen this fine spectacle a few days ago, when he first came to the Keep, he would have found it very impressive. He would have gazed at it in awe, as the citizens ringing the courtyard were doing at this moment.
But his time beyond the Wall had changed him, it seemed. All he felt now was a vague distaste. From above, the scene was almost comical. The soldiers looked like wind-up toys. The Warden looked like a doll stuffed with straw—a doll in a silly hat.
‘I had forgotten,’ Dirk muttered, his eyes hard as he stared down. ‘I saw this ceremony when I first came here. The soldiers train for it, I was told, every morning six days a week. By the Wall, why do they bother? They might as well be folk dancing for all the good it does for Weld.’
Rye glanced over his shoulder at Annocki. She was frowning, but whether this was because she resented Dirk’s criticism or because she agreed with it, he could not tell.
Turning back to the window, he raised his eyes and looked over the courtyard to the city beyond. The view was strangely pale, as if it had been painted with inks that were too watery. Stubby trees dotted the edges of flat, straight roads. Squat little houses lined the roads as far as the eye could see, with frequent sad gaps, like missing teeth, where skimmers had struck.
Rye suddenly understood how Sonia could have once mistaken a goat shelter for a house in the land beyond the golden Door. Looking down from this high tower, everything looked hunched, dull and small.
Everything except the Wall. A towering, brooding presence, the Wall rose into the hazy sky, dwarfing everything within it, spreading like giant wings from both sides of the Keep and disappearing into the distance. Close beside it, raw and ugly, ran the trench from which the clay for new bricks was dug.
Workers wearing bright yellow harnesses swarmed over the lower half of the Wall. The safety ropes netting the sheer clay surface trailed one minute and tightened the next as the men went about their work, mending and replacing, thickening and smoothing, busy and diligent as bees.
Rye saw Faene rub the pane in front of her with her sleeve. She could not understand why everything looked so dim. She thought the window was clouded. Dirk was glancing at her uneasily. Perhaps he, too, was seeing his home with new eyes, and wondering if Faene of Fleet would ever be truly happy shut away inside the Wall.
Very unsettled, Rye turned away. And it was then he realised that Sonia and Annocki were whispering furiously at one another behind his back.
‘Sonia, you ask too much!’ he heard Annocki hiss. ‘You cannot expect me to—’
‘Do not fuss, Nocki!’
‘Fuss? Sonia, you are impossible! Can you not consider my feelings for one moment? Put yourself in my position!’
And abruptly Rye remembered just what that position was. The Warden had promised his daughter’s hand in marriage to any volunteer who succeeded in saving Weld. Annocki was to have no choice in the matter. She was just part of the prize.
How she must have loathed seeing the volunteers streaming into the Keep when the Warden’s notices about the quest first went up all over the city. How she must have cringed to think that one of these men was to be her husband whether she liked it or not—and even if he did not want her.
She was no doubt sickened by the very sight of Rye and Dirk, let alone by the idea of helping them. And as for Faene, the barbarian beauty Dirk so plainly loved …
‘It will not be for long, Nocki!’ Sonia whispered. ‘Rye, Dirk and I will leave again in the morning, and with luck I will be back very soon, to give you the best of news, and the Warden the shock of his life!’
Annocki shook her head. Her eyes were bleak.
‘My good, brave friend, you are dreaming. If the Enemy sending the skimmers can be destroyed, surely it will be this Dirk, or someone like him, who will do it. Not you.’
Sonia lifted her chin. ‘It will be me,’ she said. ‘I know it seems strange, but somehow I feel even more certain of that now. Rye and Dirk will be my witnesses—and perhaps their brother, Sholto, too. The Warden will not be able to deny me.’
Her face seemed lit from within. Her eyes were glittering green.