Chapter 11 – River and Flint
Dawn scraped ice from the grass. Smoke from the burned river yard still hung over the water in a low band, brown against a pale sky. From the north tower, the river showed its injuries: char, blackened wagon frames, a scabbed strip of bank where tar had boiled.
Captain Wren gave his count on the gatehouse. "Four timber stacks cut to useless lengths. Two tar racks burned. Three wagons ruined beyond repair. Their nearest boat pier collapsed when the posts charred through." He pointed with a scarred finger. "They pulled men from the ridge to stamp the fire. Their watch thinned."
Arion nodded once. "Losses?"
"One scratch, one burn, one bolt took a chunk of leather and nothing under it." Wren's mouth did not change shape. "We came back with the same number we took out."
Sir Malrec leaned on the merlon. "They will learn. The next night will not be so soft."
"Then we do not offer them softness," Arion said. He turned from the river to the road. "Signal the tower. Eyes on the ford. I want word the breath it happens: Valeor sails or Veylan skiffs."
The horn at the north tower gave three rising notes and men moved as if a line had been drawn.
By midmorning, the gray beyond the ford pricked with small white squares—sails. They grew, folded, became barges nosing toward the far bank like cattle testing a fence. At bow and stern, Valeor men stood behind wooden mantlets bolted to the deck. Each barge showed the river stag on a pennant that snapped weakly in the cold.
"They will try to nose along the reeds," Lysandra said. She stood with Arion and Wren on the tower platform, eyes narrowed against the light. "If the river is low enough to show the shoal, they'll use it as a shield."
"Archers," Arion said. "Two ranks on the north curtain. Firepots banked and ready. No one looses until the stag is in midstream."
The barges came off the far bank in a ragged line. Six in the first flight. A low boat with oars scouted ahead, its prow wrapped in quilted cloth against splinters. The water hissed at the bow like a whispering crowd.
From the Veylan ridge, a scatter of men ran down toward the river yard, then stopped short of the charred patch and clustered, pointing. Someone with a spyglass watched them from higher ground. Then a horn gave a thin, distant challenge, and two skiffs slid from a bend upriver like snakes, their hulls dark, oars muffled.
"Right bank," Wren said. "Just past the willow stoop."
Arion lifted a hand; a runner bolted into the stairwell. A thin banner unfurled on the keep's side of the ford—a white strip with a single black circle on it. The Valeor bowman at the lead barge saw it and looked back; his oarsmen hauled a stroke to port and widened their angle, keeping the skiffs on the far side of the shoal.
On the wall, archers stood with strings slack, bows down, firepots thrumming quietly like breathing animals. The skiffs held their line a moment too long, hugging the far bank to avoid the charred yard. Then they darted, oars biting, aiming to slice between two barges and shear toward the keep's landing.
"Now," Arion said.
The Hawk archers raised in a smooth movement and loosed as one. The first flight touched water, stitched it in bright ripples, and struck hull. Men in the skiffs ducked and shouted; one oarsman sagged sideways and his oar slipped away. The next volley aimed higher. Arrows tore canvas mantlets and thudded into the low sides. A Valeor bow on the lead barge cracked; a man with a long hook shoved a skiff away when it slid too near.
"Oil," Lysandra said. "Short throw. Keep it tight."
Two pots arced from the wall, spun, and burst short of the skiffs in greasy flowers. The river carried slick toward the oars. A crosswind pushed smoke back into Veylan faces. The skiffs slewed; one oar caught in the oil, slid, and failed to bite. The skiff turned under itself and struck the shoal with a hollow thump. The other skiff, pressing too hard to clear, clipped its partner and lost a board on the bow.
"Hold," Arion said. "No cheering."
The Valeor barges came on. The lead barge hit the current's hard muscle and swung, bumping its sister like a cow nudging another through a gate. Decks lifted, settled. The first bow rope shot from the barge into the keep's landing and caught a ring; a boatman made it fast with practiced hands. One by one, the barges thumped into place and were snubbed hard against the stone.
Valeor men stepped onto the landing with spears upright, faces gray with cold. Hawk soldiers went down the stair to meet them and made a lane. Grain sacks appeared as if by sleight of hand, a line formed, and bags began to walk into the keep like a slow, stubborn animal.
Aric oversaw the landing. He said little. He didn't need to. When a sack line slowed, he moved to that lane and the pace mended. When a rope slipped, he set his shoulder and drew it tight and didn't ask for three men to help. His presence kept things straight as a beam.
Lady Nyra came down the stair a quarter hour later, cloak lifted clear of mud. She took the tally slate from her steward without a word and began checking figures. Each time a bag passed a notch, she marked. When the first barge was empty, she closed the tally and traded a nod with Aric, nothing more.
On the far bank, the skiffs struggled to backwater into a bend and vanished. The Veylans put two more boats in—their hulls lighter, their crews crouched—but the current took them like twigs and the archers on the wall, now settled to work, found them each time they showed a hand above a gunwale.
By noon, ten barges had been emptied. The keep's granary doors stood open, dark mouths swallowing. Bakers' boys passed flour sacks as if they were handling babies. The smell of yeast began to push the reek of old smoke aside.
Sir Malrec watched from the second landing with two of the king's men and said nothing until the last rope came off the last ring. Then: "Her figures are honest," he observed to Arion.
"They will remain so," Arion replied.
Valeor boatsmen took water and bread and pushed off. Their arms shook with the cold. As the final barge drifted back toward the far bank, a dozen small lights flickered to life along the Veylan ridge and winked out: mirror flashes, passed from hand to hand like a quiet alarm.
"Message lines," Wren said. "They saw enough."
"They saw grain come where their boats failed to stop it," Arion said. "Let them carry that, too."
The landing cleared. The gatehouse swallowed the last sack. Men exhaled without saying they had held their breath.
In the hall, smoke retired to the rafters and the tables filled with ink instead of meat. The ford compact lay open, the wax cool and the seals bright. Valeor stewards and Hawk reeves walked figures back and forth, trading them like weights until both sides nodded. Sir Malrec's scribe, neat as a tailor, copied what mattered to the crown: tons in, tons stored, tons issued. A royal engineer, lean and polite, sketched a new brace for the east stair and asked for rope with the ease of a man who was used to people giving him what he needed.
No one spoke about the tray from the night before, but the kitchen fires burned under the eyes of two guards now, and every jug that entered the hall did so with a note attached: who filled it, where, and when. The cook who had hired the tongue-bitten servant stood with her hands folded and answered questions until her voice went hoarse. Lady Serenya dismissed her before anyone else could, with a purse and a letter of safe-conduct and a look that said the cost of fear had been paid in front of too many witnesses.
Shortly before dusk, the hawk banner caught the light and snapped. The ford tower oath was spoken at the base of the pole, fifty Hawk men and fifty Valeor men kneeling, palm to stone and palm to palm. The oath-master read slowly, the words landing like pegs driven into a beam. When they rose, the faces on both sides were set in the same way—stern, relieved, watchful.
The river answered with a thicker sound: a new drum, deeper, steadier. Heads turned toward the ridge. On the Veylan rise, crews hauled at ropes. A wooden frame climbed against the sky, crooked and ugly until one saw it whole. Counterweights hung, swaying. A sling arm creaked and settled.
"Trebuchet," Sir Malrec said.
"Small," Wren measured aloud. "First throw will be short."
"First throw is always short," Arion agreed. "And then they learn."
Men along the wall buckled chinstraps and pulled shields close. Archers shifted quivers around to the side where they would not be smashed. The engineer stepped back from his chalked brace and folded his hands in his sleeves as if in prayer, though his eyes never left the frame on the ridge.
The first stone rose like a pale moon and fell like a stupid thought, short of the curtain by twenty paces. It bounced twice and rolled to the ditch, where it stopped against a post and sat, already at home among the other rocks of the world. Men snorted, then caught themselves and fell quiet.
The second stone came farther. It struck the outer bank of the ditch and chipped a tooth from it. Mud collapsed in a wet sigh. The third stone thumped the curtain wall low enough to send dust puffing along the parapet and shake mortar into the joints like salt shaken from a hand.
"Good," Arion said flatly. "Now we measure their rhythm."
A runner brought the count: the time from the sling's drop to the stone's arrival, long enough to move men under cover, not long enough to leave them there forever. Lysandra set the rotation with her captains: archers down while the sling raised, up when the arm began to fall, shields angled to meet the blast, then a step back while the dust cleared. After four throws, the line moved like a single body.
The fifth shot took a bite from the corner of the north tower's parapet. A man disappeared from sight. His helmet reappeared a moment later, empty, spinning, then fell in the gap between crenels. No one spoke his name; the watch still needed voices.
When the Veylans began throwing jars of thick liquid instead of stone, the engineer already had sand buckets lined under the merlons. The first jar broke and spread syrup across a merlon where it would have made a torch of any man foolish enough to stand there. Sand fell in fast drifts and turned the black into a dead crust. The second jar struck the wall and broke along it; the engineer's buckets were there, too.
By full dark, the trebuchet crews were breathing hard and their throws had shortened as men tired and ropes stretched. Torches walked along the ridge like short processions. The drums slowed.
In the hall, the talk turned to names again, because war always does when men stop moving—names of lords who would sign the marriage compact or fight it, names of vassals whose sons would be sent as squires to keep the river oath tidy, names of bakeries that could turn flour into marching loaves without losing half to smoke and stories.
"We will put three Valeor men in each bakery," Lady Nyra said. "Not to take bread first, but to count the sacks out and the loaves back. If a man cheats his own famine and feeds the serpents, I prefer to know it before the serpents do."
"You will not place your men at my mill," Darven objected, then looked at Arion and changed it to: "Our mill."
"Two Hawk men, one Valeor," Arion said. "No more. We count in daylight."
Sir Malrec only listened as the ledger grew. When he spoke, it was to the engineer: "You will have rope from the king's stores by week's end. If you require oak pegs instead of iron nails, write it. Iron shatters when stone rings it."
Aric stayed on his feet and used his hands. He helped lift a beam to brace the gap the fifth stone had made, leaned his shoulder to the weight until the pegs took, and held a lantern for the engineer while the man sighted along the line to see where fear would crack the wall first. He spoke to the new garrison at the ford tower long enough to learn which faces could sit awake longest without going blind to shadows, and then he went down the stair and checked the landing rings by touch in the dark, counting knuckles of iron around each, the way a man learns the face of a coin he will have to spend in a hurry.
Close to midnight, a shout from the south bastion pulled men along the inner walk. Wren arrived first and held the line with two squads while the rest came up at a trot. Torches showed a ragged band of cloaked figures stumbling across the field toward the ditch, hands raised, no banners.
"Deserters," Wren said. "Or actors."
"Arrows nocked," Lysandra ordered. "If they run at the last step, we cut them."
The figures slowed, then sank to their knees, palms lifted. When the torches reached them, faces came clear: Veylan levy men, not much older than the staves Aric had drilled that morning, cheeks hollow, eyes red, a woman among them with ash on her hair as if she'd put out a house fire before someone made her walk away from it.
"Let us in," their leader called, voice ruined. "We'll swear to your bread. We're done with serpent work."
"Drop weapons," Wren called. "Belts, knives, anything sharp. Move slow."
They obeyed, clumsy with cold and fear. Hooks went down from the inner ditch bank. The keep hauled the first four up. The last man in the line stumbled and grabbed for a hook before it reached him.
Aric was already there. He went down the bank on a rope and steadied the man until the hook found him. He did not speak. He did not smile. One by one, the deserters came over the lip and lay on their backs and looked at the stars as if they belonged to someone else now.
"Put them in the lower hall," Arion said, when the count had been made twice. "Feed them. Separate them from one another until morning. We will find out what they know after they remember what bread is."
Sir Malrec watched them pass with a face that betrayed nothing. "If they are true," he said, "then the serpent line frays. If they are not, then your carelessness will harm you."
"We do not feed carelessness," Arion said. "We feed hunger. The morning can judge the rest."
When the last door bar settled and the last horn call stroked the battlement into silence, the keep seemed to take a breath of its own. The ridge still glowed where the Veylans clustered their fires. The trebuchet stood against the stars like a gallows. Somewhere on the far bank, a hammer ticked as someone adjusted a pin before sleep.
On the wall, Aric and Lysandra took the last walk together. They did not speak. They had done enough of that for one day. Men nodded when they passed, some with tight smiles, some with the smudged faces of those who had learned that joy makes a poor armor.
At the north tower, they stopped. The river muttered to itself below, shouldering toward the sea. The landing rings were cold under a bare hand. The hawk banner hung in the windless dark as if waiting for breath.
A runner came up the stair and bent without losing the pace of his feet. "Captain Wren says a Veylan patrol crossed above the ford," he said. "Small. Six or eight. They went into the reeds and haven't come out."
Arion's answer arrived a moment later down the line, carried by another runner. "Wake two boats. No crests. No lanterns. If they search, let them search empty water. If they reach the bank, put them under it."
Men moved without comment. In the yard, oars came off pegs, mufflers came out of chests, blades were slotted into low scabbards where they would not catch the light. The boats slid into the water and disappeared.
The keep held its breath again. The ridge held its fires. Between them, on the black ribbon that belonged to neither, the night waited to see what name it would learn next.