The Siege of Scarrow

All day the hounds went round the crag.

Wren watched them from the wall. They ran in a loose pack along the river below, pale shapes in the brown grass, then up across the water-meadows and away east along the valley road, and back. They never came within bowshot. They were letting Scarrow look at them.

And behind the hounds, all through the long gray day, the dead came in.

They came out of the west, from the direction of the White. At first there were only a few, walking slowly along the river, stopping, walking on. By noon there were a hundred standing in the fields below the crag with their faces turned up toward the town, and by the middle of the afternoon Wren could no longer guess how many. They stood in the stubble and among the thorn bushes and in the shallows of the river, gray-blue and patient, and more came over the western rise every hour.

The Stayers on the wall knew some of them.

"That's Anna Brannock," said the woman beside Wren. Her name was Gwen. She had a long bow and a face that gave nothing away. "In the blue. By the ford. I stood up with her at her wedding."

Wren looked, and wished she hadn't. A woman in a blue shawl stood at the ford with the water running round her knees, and beside her stood a small shape that came up to her waist.

"And the old ones," Gwen said. "From out in the White. You see the furs? Nobody's worn furs cut like that in my lifetime. Those have been lying in the snow since before the gate was shut."

The old ones were worse, gray and shrunken in rotted hides, and some had no faces left at all.

At the end of the afternoon the sun came out under the clouds, low and red in the west, and every one of the dead below the crag turned its head and looked at it. Then the sun went down and the light went blue. From somewhere out beyond the river a horn sounded one long falling note, and the dead began to walk.

Madoc had drawn Scarrow for them in the dirt the day before, so that everyone knew where to be.

The crag was steep on every side, and on the north and west it was sheer cliff, so that only the south face could be climbed. Up the south face, from the valley floor to the top, ran the road, turning back and forth on itself in six long switchbacks cut into the rock. At the top of the last switchback stood the outer gate, two leaves of oak bound with iron, set in a squat gatehouse tower.

Behind the outer gate was the gate-court, a walled yard of bare stone, with the fire-pits running along both its side walls, full of heather and peat and pitch. At the far end of the gate-court was the inner gate, smaller and older, and through it lay the town.

The wall walk ran over the top of all of it. From above the outer gate you could look straight down onto the road. From the wall above the gate-court you could look down into the yard on one side and over the cliff on the other. If you kept walking north, past the last of the houses, you came to the round turret where the wall met the rock and the beacon path went up.

Wren stood on the wall above the outer gate, a little to the left of the gatehouse tower, with her sling in her hand and Ewan's bag of iron shot at her feet.

To her right, on the tower top, stood Morag with the captains of the wall and a boy with a horn. Hew Brannock had a dozen archers there. Madoc was among them, though he had not been on the gate watch for five days. His mother had looked at him that morning and pointed at the tower without a word, and he had gone.

Merritt lay propped on a pile of sacking in the angle of the parapet, a few yards from Wren, with her crossbow across a stone and a basket of bolts by her hand. She looked ghastly and cheerful.

Down in the gate passage behind the outer gate were Bracken and Ewan Tull and twenty Stayer spearmen. Bracken had his boar-spear, and Ewan a smith's hammer whose head was the size of a loaf. Iyene had the north end of the wall, and Alder was at the inner gate with his staff. Dorrit and Pip were everywhere at once, with a yoke of pitch-pots over each of their shoulders and a boy with a coal-pan running behind them.

"Here they come," said Merritt.

The dead came up the road. They came up the first switchback in a gray mass, shoulder to shoulder, silent, and the hounds ran among them and ahead of them, baying. The road was only wide enough for a cart, and the dead filled it from rock to edge and kept coming. Some were pushed off the outer edge. They fell, and got up again in the rocks below, and climbed back.

"Hold," said Morag.

The first switchback was full, and then the second.

"Hold."

Wren had a shot in her sling, and her hand was sweating. Beside her Gwen had an arrow nocked, its pitch-head unlit, with a clay coal-pot smoking at her feet.

The dead turned onto the third switchback. A frost-hound ran out ahead of them, up the fourth, so close that its open mouth showed blue-black.

"Now," said Morag.

The boy with the horn blew. All along the wall, archers dipped their arrows in the coal-pots, and the pitch caught with a soft whump, and they drew and loosed. The arrows went up in a burning arc and came down on the road below.

The Stayers had spent two days soaking that road. They had poured pitch onto the second switchback and the third and scattered it with dry heather, and it had lain there all day under the eyes of the dead. Now the arrows fell into it. For a moment nothing happened. Then the fire ran.

It ran along the third switchback from end to end and down the ramp onto the second, and the whole road blazed up yellow, and the dead on it burned.

Wren heard the sound. She had heard it on the high pasture above Dall, and in Fallowmere's yard. It was a spitting, hissing crackle like fat in a pan, and under it the thin scream that had no breath behind it. It came up from the road a hundred times over, and the smoke came up with it, black and stinking.

The dead did not stop. They walked into the fire. The ones behind pushed the ones in front, and they went down burning, and the next ones walked over them.

"Loose," said Morag. "Keep loosing. Hew. The hounds."

The hounds had come through. They leapt the burning road in long white bounds, fur smoking, and ran up the last switchbacks toward the gate. Hew's archers loosed at them. One went down with an arrow through its ribs and slid screaming off the road. Another came on.

Wren stood, whirled the sling once, and let go.

The iron shot took the hound on the side of the head as it came round the last bend, and it dropped dead in the road. Wren had another shot in the pouch before she heard Merritt say, "Oh, nice," and then the crossbow thumped, and a second hound flipped over backward with a bolt in its chest.

"Crows," Wren said, and loaded again.

It went on and on.

The fire on the lower road burned down, and the dead came through the embers. They came up the fourth switchback and the fifth, and the arrows fell among them, and the ones the arrows lit burned and fell, and the rest came on. There were always more of them. When the front of the mass reached the last switchback, below the gate, Morag shouted for the pitch.

Dorrit and Pip came running along the wall walk with the pots swinging on their yokes.

"Here!" Morag shouted. "Here! Over!"

Pip got his first pot to the parapet and tipped it. Black pitch went over the wall in a long rope and fell on the heads of the dead crowding the road under the gate. The boy with the coal-pan threw a shovel of coals after it, and the pitch caught with a roar.

"Gods' teeth," Dorrit said. She stood beside Wren with her face blacked with smoke and her curly hair singed at the front. She tipped her pot and ducked back. "I've boiled jam in less time than this takes."

"Your hands," Wren said.

Dorrit looked at them. Both palms were red and blistering where the pot handles had burned through her rags. "They're fine."

"They're burned."

"They're fine. I'm a healer. I'd know." Dorrit shoved her yoke back onto her shoulders. "Pip! More!"

Pip was already gone, running back along the wall toward the pitch-fire in the town with the coal boy at his heels, grinning as he had been grinning all night. He ran along the top of a wall with a drop into a burning yard on one side and a drop into the dark on the other, and he did not look down once. Wren remembered him on the Stair, green-faced, clinging to the rock.

Below the gate, the dead in the burning pitch had stopped screaming. They lay in a heap across the road, still burning, and the ones behind climbed over the heap, and reached the gate, and put their hands on it.

Wren felt it before she saw it. The wall under her feet went cold.

She looked down over the parapet. The dead were pressed against the outer gate in a mass, dozens deep, pushed forward by the ones behind, with their gray hands spread flat on the oak. And from their hands, spreading outward across the gate, came frost.

It ran over the wood in white feathers and crept along the iron bands. It climbed the gate from the bottom up, and where it passed, the oak went pale and hard. Wren could hear it, a small ticking sound all over the gate, like a pond icing on a winter night.

"Morag," she said. "Morag, the gate—"

"I see it."

In the gate passage below, somebody shouted. Wren heard Bracken's voice, very calm.

"Bar's cold, sir. Getting colder."

"Hold it," Morag shouted down.

"Holding it."

The gate groaned as the dead pushed. The frost ran thicker over the timbers until the whole outer face of the gate was white and bristling, and the iron bands were white, and the great hinges set into the stone. Wren heard a sharp crack. Then another.

"It's the wood," Merritt said. She had pulled herself up to look. "It's going brittle. It's freezing right through."

Another crack. A long split opened down the left leaf of the gate, top to bottom, and through the split Wren saw gray fingers pushing.

"Ewan!" Morag shouted. "Hammer!"

From inside the gate passage came a great clang, and a crunch, and Ewan's voice, roaring and cheerful. "Got one! Come on then, come on, I've a hammer for every one of you—"

The left hinge burst out of the wall.

It went with a shriek of iron and a spray of stone. The left leaf of the gate lurched inward and hung for a moment on the bar, and then the bar snapped, a beam of oak as thick as a man's body. Both leaves of the gate fell inward. The dead came through.

Wren could not see into the gate passage from the wall, but she could see the gate-court. She saw the first of the defenders come backing out of the passage into the yard with their spears up. Then more came, and then the dead came out after them, a gray flood pouring through the gate tunnel into the court.

Bracken came out last. He came out backward, fighting. A dead man lunged at him, and he took it on the spear's crossbar and threw it back into the others. Beside him Ewan swung his hammer, and a dead head burst. They gave ground together, step by step, across the court toward the inner gate.

"Back!" Morag was shouting. "Back! Inner gate! Madoc, cover them!"

The archers on the tower turned and loosed down into the yard, and burning arrows fell among the dead. Madoc shot fast and flat, and never seemed to aim. A dead thing reaching for Bracken's back took an arrow in the neck and burst into flame. Another, and another.

Hew Brannock leaned out over the parapet to get a better angle on the court, and a frost-hound came up the outside of the tower.

Wren did not see how, for there was nothing there to climb. She saw it rise over the parapet, all pale fur and blue eyes. It closed its jaws on Hew's shoulder and pulled, and Hew went over the wall with it without a cry, down into the gate-court among the dead.

Madoc shouted his name. Then he turned and shot down into the court, three arrows as fast as Wren could breathe, and Wren did not look at where they went.

The defenders were halfway across the gate-court when the dead caught them.

There were too many. They came out of the gate tunnel faster than the Stayers could back away, and spread out across the court and came round the sides. Wren saw a Stayer spearman go down with gray hands on his throat. She saw Ewan knock two of the dead flying with one swing. A third got its arms around him from behind, and Bracken turned and speared it through the body and wrenched it off him.

The inner gate stood open behind them. It had to be open, or they could not get through, and there was no time to close it.

Then Alder came walking out of it, slowly, as he did everything, his brown cloak dark in the firelight. His staff was in his good hand and his wrenched arm was strapped against his chest. He walked out past the retreating Stayers, past Bracken and Ewan, and stopped a few paces in front of the inner gate, with the gray tide of the dead coming at him across the court.

He did not look up at the wall. He looked at the dead. He put the foot of his staff to the stones and walked sideways, dragging it in a line from wall to wall across the mouth of the inner gate.

Alder spoke a Word. The air went cold, and the flames in the fire-pits bent away from him.

Behind the staff, on the stones, a line appeared. It was thin and white and shone with the pale, even light of the moon on frost, and it ran from wall to wall of the gate-court, with Alder standing behind it.

The dead reached it and stopped, as if they had walked into glass. The front rank struck the line and halted, and the ones behind crushed up against them. The gray mass heaped up there, pushing, clawing at the air, and could not come one inch over.

Alder took one step back, and fell down.

Bracken caught him before he hit the stones and picked him up in one arm, with the spear in the other hand, and walked back through the inner gate with him. Ewan came after, bleeding from the scalp and laughing, and the last of the Stayer spearmen after him.

"Warding," Wren said aloud, though nobody heard her. "That's Warding."

"Fire-pits!" Morag was shouting. "Now! Fire the pits!"

Every archer on the wall turned and shot down into the gate-court. The burning arrows fell into the long trenches along the walls, into the heather and the peat and the pitch, and the fire-pits caught one after another with a great flapping roar. In a moment both sides of the gate-court were walls of flame.

The dead were trapped between them. Ahead of them was the Warding line, which they could not cross, and behind them the gate tunnel was jammed solid with more of the dead pushing in. On either side was fire.

They burned. Wren made herself watch, with the heat coming up at her face and the smoke stinging her eyes, while down in the gate-court the dead burned in their hundreds. They fell, and more came out of the tunnel behind them and burned too. Somewhere in there was Hew Brannock, and somewhere in there was the hound that had taken him.

Dorrit was beside her again. She took Wren's hand in her blistered one and held it hard.

"Alder," Wren said.

"Bracken's got him. He's breathing. He's the color of porridge." Dorrit swallowed. "He opened his eyes when Bracken put him down and asked me was the line holding, like he was asking the time. Mad old goat."

It was past midnight when the horn sounded from the north.

It was close. It came from inside the walls, from the dark end of the wall walk where the beacon path went up. It was so loud that half the archers on the gate tower spun round with their bows drawn.

On the crag above, the beacon still burned, and its light fell down the black cliff onto the north turret. In that light Wren saw a tall figure step over the parapet onto the wall walk.

It was the Huntress. She had climbed the cliff.

She wore rotted green, and her white hair had come loose from its tie and hung down her back in a long rope. She had a hunting spear in one hand, and at her hip, on its baldric, the silver horn shone in the firelight. She stood on the wall walk and looked south along it, toward the gate. Two Stayers who had been on watch at the turret lay at her feet and did not move.

Iyene was already running toward her. Wren did not decide; she was running too, along the wall walk, with the bag of iron shot bouncing on her hip. Behind her she heard Dorrit shout her name, and Morag shout something, and she did not stop. The wall walk was narrow, with the drop into the town on her right and the parapet and the cliff on her left. Houses went by below, and the sparks from the burning gate-court blew past her face.

Ahead of her Iyene reached the Huntress, and they met.

Iyene came in low and fast with her sabre. The Huntress turned the blade aside with the shaft of her spear, an easy, bored movement. Then she struck back with the butt, and Iyene took it on her sabre's guard and was driven back two steps.

Iyene came in again. Cut, cut, thrust. The Huntress gave no ground. She never seemed to hurry, yet she was always somewhere else when the steel arrived. Her spear point flicked out. Iyene twisted, and it tore her coat at the shoulder instead of opening her throat.

Wren stopped thirty yards short. The wall walk was too narrow, and Iyene was between her and the Huntress. She pulled a shot from the bag and put it in the sling.

The Huntress drove Iyene back, step by step, the spear coming in high, low, high. Iyene's blade rang on the shaft, and she lost another step, and another. Her back was nearly to the turret now. She was breathing hard. The Huntress was not breathing at all.

The spear came up for a thrust at Iyene's chest. Wren whirled once and let go. The iron shot hit the Huntress in the side of the face with a crack like a dropped plate.

She staggered, for the first time that night. She put a hand to her face, and where the iron had struck her the gray skin had gone black and smoking. She hissed, and for a moment her spear point wavered.

Iyene went in.

She went in under the spear, inside its reach, close enough to smell the grave on the Huntress's clothes. Her sabre came up and cut across the Huntress's body, and the rotted green tore, and there was no blood. The Huntress struck her across the head with the spear shaft, and Iyene fell against the parapet.

She fell on her back against the stones, and the Huntress stood over her. The spear came up in both hands, point down, and as the Huntress raised it the horn swung out on its baldric, close over Iyene's face. The beacon light from the crag fell full on it. It was silver, old and dented and fine. On its bell, worked in raised silver, a hart was leaping, with its forelegs tucked and its head thrown back.

Wren saw Iyene see it. Iyene did not reach for her sabre or try to roll away. She lay on her back under the spear and looked up into the Huntress's face, and she shouted in a voice that rang off the rock.

"Maud Everard! Master of the King's Hounds!"

The Huntress stopped.

The spear stopped in the air. The long gray body stopped. Around her the wind off the moor seemed to stop too, and the sparks hung in it.

It happened in her face first, as the gray went out of it. For one breath there was a woman on the wall walk in a hunting coat of good green wool. She was tall and tired, perhaps forty, with brown hair coming loose from its pins and mud on her boots. She had a long, plain, weathered face, the face of someone who has been out in all weathers for a great many years. She looked down at Iyene, and round her at the wall, the burning town, the fire on the crag, and she looked very puzzled and very tired.

"Is the hunt over?" she said. Her voice was hoarse and slow.

Iyene was still on her back, with the woman's shadow over her. "It's over," she said.

The woman let out a breath and lowered the spear. She looked about to sit down.

Then the frost took her. It came up over her from the feet, white and swift, over the boots and the green coat and the tired face, and for an instant she stood there as a figure of rime. Then the wind came back off the moor and blew through her. The frost went away on it in a glittering cloud, out over the parapet into the dark. What was left fell onto the wall walk with a dry clatter: bones, brown and old, and a silver horn.

Out in the valley, the hounds began to howl.

It was no hunting cry. It rose high and broken and terrible, the noise of animals that had lost something. Wren ran to the parapet and looked out. Down on the valley floor, lit by the fires of the burning road, pale shapes were running every way at once. They ran away from the crag and from each other, out into the dark fields, howling as they went. In a few minutes the howling was far off, and then it was gone.

Iyene got up slowly. She had a cut on her scalp that bled down into her collar, and she held her left arm oddly. She stood and looked at the heap of bones, and then she bent and picked up the horn.

"She was in the officer roll," she said, to Wren, or to nobody. "Maud Everard. Master of the Hounds. Appointed in the thirty-first year of the old king. The device of her house was a leaping hart." She turned the horn over in her hands. "I found her in the roll after the barn. Her and three other hunt officers. I had to see the hart to know which."

"You nearly saw it from underneath her spear."

"Yes." Iyene looked at her. "That was a good shot, Fallowmere."

"Crows," Wren said, and found that her legs had gone to water, and sat down on the wall walk.

Iyene put the horn inside her coat. She straightened the coat and wiped the blood out of her eye with her sleeve, and then she walked back along the wall toward the gate to see how the battle was going.

It went on until dawn. The dead kept coming out of the gate tunnel, and the fire-pits kept burning. The Stayers fed them with peat and heather and the last of the pitch, and anything else that would burn: broken carts, old doors, the bench from the healer's house. The Warding line held. It shone white across the mouth of the inner gate all night, with a heap of the dead against it that grew and burned and grew again.

Toward morning fewer of the dead came through, and then only a few, and then none.

Wren sat on the parapet over the gate-court with Dorrit and watched the fires go down. Dorrit had bound her hands in wet linen and would not let anyone look at them. Pip was asleep against the parapet with his mouth open and his face black, and Merritt had been carried down. Bracken sat on the step of the inner gate with Alder's head in his lap, both of them gray with ash. He had the look of a man waiting to be told where to put something down.

The sky went pale in the east, and then pink.

The Warding line began to fade. Wren watched it dim from white to gray, and from gray to a faint silver, and as the first edge of the sun came up over the eastern hills it was gone. The heap of ash and bones in front of it did not move. There was nothing left in the gate-court to cross it.

Morag Tull stood on the gate tower and looked out over her town, her face black with smoke and blood on her sleeve that was not hers. Madoc stood a few yards from her with an empty quiver, looking at the place where Hew had gone over.

Below the crag the valley was full of smoke. It lay along the river in a thick brown blanket, lit gold by the sunrise, with the black ruin of the burned road coming up out of it.

Something was walking up out of the smoke.

It was tall, and it was white. It came along the valley road from the east, the way the company had come from the mountains, at a steady walk, and the smoke parted round it and closed behind it. Where it walked, the brown grass on either side of the road went white, and the sunlight caught on it and glittered all the way up and down its length, on iron.

Wren stood up. "Morag," someone said on the tower.

Morag had seen it, and she watched it come until it reached the foot of the switchback road. Then she turned to the boy with the horn.

"Wake the town," she said.