The Boy Bride #2
So when General Mathista announced that he’d taken Vanu Urártu, you’d think he’d have followed it up by riding through the valleys with Vanu’s head on a spear. Instead they’d left him up here. That was what you could expect from the regular troops. They were lazy.
Lill gathered up his skirts and ran up the log, his bare feet unerring on the smooth wood.
He wasn’t trying to show off—it was the surest way to get up, goatlike, trusting his instincts and not thinking about how far away the ground was getting—but he also didn’t care if it surprised the onlookers.
It was too late for them to wonder why Vanu Urártu was getting a boy bride who could do things like that.
He was not resigned to his fate, or not in the way that Halza and the soldiers imagined.
He would go over that stone wall to whatever lay on the other side, but he was coming back.
He didn’t yet know how, but when he was done here, when he had killed Vanu Urártu—if the Lion of the Summer Pass was still alive in there—he was coming back out.
He reached the top of the ladder and scrambled up onto the summit of the wall.
Though the base of the wall was massive, it tapered at the top almost to point, capped with a ridge of large, unworked stones, set upright, that provided hardly any place to stand.
Lill climbed to his feet and looked down on the other side, the first person to do so in three years, if those soldiers could be believed.
He was standing directly above the blocked-up gate of the stronghold, and below him, within the circle of the walls, was spread out a small village.
Two dozen houses, along with barns and other buildings, were closely packed into the space, built of stone like the walls and timber from the mountain forests.
About half of them were in ruins, roofless shells, some showing signs of burning.
The others were roofed, some with straw, some with slate shingles.
Some looked ancient and crude, barely more than huts; others were elaborate, modern, two-storey houses with wooden gables and balconies.
As Lill stood looking down, a duck strolled out from behind a broken-down stone wall and looked placidly around a yard between houses. A second duck followed.
Opposite the gate, a larger, grander building—the lord’s house presumably—stood half-ruined, half-intact.
Low-canopied, thick-trunked trees full of pale blossoms grew between some of the houses, and every patch of tillable ground had been planted.
Paving stones had been pulled up in some places to yield extra garden space, and the floors of a couple of the roofless houses had been similarly torn out, so that the ruins bristled with young green plant tops.
A slight whistling sound was all the warning Lill had before an arrow sliced past, so close to his face that it rattled the hanging beads of his headdress. He scanned quickly for its source but couldn’t find it; the angle had been odd, and he had been so totally unprepared.
He was taking too long, was too exposed here.
The archer, even if there was only one, had had plenty of time now to prepare a second shot.
Lill moved to crouch on the ridge of the wall, making himself a smaller target, and as he moved he saw it, the flash of motion at an upper window in one of the larger houses.
He dodged the second arrow, but caught his foot on the skirt of his gown and toppled forward off the wall.
He clawed at the stones as he fell, scraping his palm but catching hold of the ridge with one hand, then two. He dangled there, high above the pavement below. His headdress wobbled but stayed in place, the veil wrapped around his neck.
He heard shouts and dizzily recognized that they were coming from both sides of the wall, a confusion of voices speaking Zashian and the language of the Passes, but all yelling more or less the same things:
“Stop!”
and
“What are you doing?”
The ducks quacked and flapped their wings as the archer emerged onto the paved path leading to the gate to line up another shot. Lill twisted around and saw him, a big man in black clothes, with long chestnut-brown hair and a pale face with the round, light eyes of the mountain people.
He raised his bow and sighted along the arrow as a girl shouted out the window of the house he had just exited: “Stop shooting at her, you—” The sentence dissolved into a long string of guttural mountain-people vowels that Lill could not make out.
The next arrow pierced Lill’s skirts as he tried to swing himself back up onto the top of the wall. The arrowhead went through all the layers of fabric and lodged in the soft mortar of the wall, pinning him in place.
The archer and the girl were shouting back and forth in dialect he didn’t understand. From outside the wall he heard Halza’s voice: “I’m coming!”
“We’re being attacked!” the archer bawled from below.
Lill was hanging by one hand, wrenching desperately at the arrow with the other, but it was lodged firmly in the wad of cloth and the wall beneath.
Braids and beads and veil kept getting in his face.
He didn’t dare call out; they might guess from his voice that he wasn’t a woman, in spite of his clothes, and it would only confirm their fears of an attack.
But he couldn’t let Halza reach the top of the wall and get himself shot.
He had not accepted Halza’s offer of the horse, but he still owed his guide something for making it.
And there had been other gestures of kindness on the journey up from Torakand; he’d given Lill extra food at lunch and reprimanded the palanquin bearers when they gossiped about him.
Surely it would be dishonour to let the man get killed.
“Hang on, I have almost got you!” came another voice from the village, this one in Zashian heavy with the accent of the Passes.
“What in the”—some word full of phlegmy consonants—“are you doing, Tirtu?” That was the archer again.
“Hang on, lad! Almost there!”
Lill switched from one stinging hand to the other to twist around, clawing the veil out of the way, and look below him.
Another brown-haired Mountain Pass man in black clothing was pushing a cart full of straw toward the gate.
A scuffling on the ridge at the head of the ladder announced the arrival of Halza.
Lill saw the archer adjust his aim upward and draw back his bowstring.
Desperate, Lill dug with his free hand into the back of his sash and pulled out one of his shoes.
He twisted again, bracing one bare foot against the wall, hampered by the arrow through his skirt, and flung the shoe at the archer.
It hit him in the forehead, and the arrow flew wide, just as Lill’s cramped fingers slipped and let go of the stones, and he fell.
He heard his clothing tear, a huge section of costly fabric ripping away, screams and shouts from above and below, saw the stones of the wall whirl in front of him and the steel grey of the sky overhead, and then he was hitting something with a splintering crash and a bright explosion of pain, and he was still moving, rolling and sliding into darkness.
He opened his eyes and tried to focus. There was a man’s face, stern and scarred but improbably, implacably beautiful. One of the fighting angels, fresh from a battlefield in the war with the forces of the Dark Valley. His hair was pale gold. His eyes were like a cloudless sky, a piercing blue.
Lill tried to fling up a hand, but his limbs were heavy and aching, his body unresponsive, as if far away from his mind. He tried to form the word “No,” but could not remember how it sounded. The world spun again, in a tumble of pain and nausea. The angel, the gold-haired man, was gone.