26. Wren
WREN
The dam is dying under my feet and I won’t let it take the valley with it.
I've got maybe thirty villagers on the timbers with me — the half Malvek sent upriver, Garrik at their head — and we are waging a war on two fronts at once.
Pike's men come at, trying to drive us off the dam long enough for the river to finish what their saws began.
And the river itself comes at us from below, brown and vast and furious, hammering the wounded structure, finding every cut support and leaning its whole terrible weight against them.
"Braces here!" I scream over the storm, because I'm the one who saw where the timbers were cut and I'm the only one who knows which wounds are mortal.
"The downstream supports — that's where they sawed them, that's what's failing!
Get the new beams under them, wedge them, rope them to the sound ones!
Bucket line, keep the fire off the west end, they've got pitch! Move, move!"
And they move. Farmers who never in their lives took an order from a slip of a woman half their age move the instant I speak, because tonight I am not a bought girl or a stranger — tonight I am the one with the plan, and a valley drowning in the dark will follow anyone who sounds like they know the way out.
We wedge fresh timber under the sawn supports.
We lash the failing beams to the whole ones with every rope we hauled up the hill.
We hold, and the river screams against us, and we hold.
Garrik fights as someone might half his age, axe in hand, driving back two of Pike's men who've gained the dam's top.
Bren is everywhere at once, too brave by half, hauling beams too big for him, darting along the treacherous rain-slick timbers to carry rope where it's needed.
I open my mouth to tell him to slow down, to be careful, to—
The dam lurches. A whole section of the top walkway drops out from under him with a crack like a felled tree, and Bren goes down with it, into the churning brown water and the broken timbers, and his scream cuts through the storm and through my heart.
I don't think. I go after him.
I'm flat on my belly on the shuddering timbers with my arm plunged into water so cold it stops the breath in my chest, and the river wants him, the river wants us alike, and I get a fist in the collar of his coat and I haul with everything I have and everything I don't. My shoulder wrenches.
My grip on the beam above is nothing but will.
For one endless moment the river is stronger than I am and I feel myself going in after him — and then Garrik's big hand closes on my ankle, and another farmer grabs my belt, and between us all we drag Bren up out of the water half-drowned and coughing but alive, alive, blessedly alive.
"Off the dam," I gasp at him, shoving him toward Garrik. "You've done enough, you brave fool. Get to high ground."
He goes, for the one time. And that's when Pike's men reach me.
Three of them, driven back off the failing structure toward the one target that might still turn the night — the woman calling the orders.
They come at me across the broken walkway with knives out and murder plain on their faces, and I've a length of bracing-timber in my hands and nothing else, and I know with a cold and distant clarity that I cannot fight three armed men on a collapsing dam in the dark and win.
But I can make noise. I can make them work for it.
I can hold this scrap of timber long enough for—
A roar splits the night, and the storm itself seems to flinch.
Malvek comes across the dam like the wrath of every hell his people ever crawled out of.
He is a ruin — I see it even in the lightning-flashes, the blood sheeting from a dozen wounds, one arm hanging wrong, and none of it slows him by a breath.
He hits Pike's three men like the flood itself.
Two go into the river. The third he throws the length of the walkway, and the man does not get up.
And then Malvek is between me and all of it, vast and bleeding and shaking, having crossed the whole battlefield and left his own fight to reach mine.
"You came," I breathe.
"Always," he says, and then a blade I didn't see — a fourth man, down and forgotten, driving up from the timbers — buries itself in Malvek's side, and he makes a sound I will hear in my nightmares for all my remaining years, and he still turns and ends the man before he crumples to one knee on the shuddering dam.
"Malvek—"
"The supports." His voice is wet and ragged and utterly certain. "Wren. The supports, now, while the water's at its peak — if we hold them through this surge the river drops and the dam stands. It's now. Help me. Together."
So we do not weep and we do not stop. Not yet.
There's no time for either. I get my shoulder under his good arm and he gets his ruined weight behind the last great brace, and I call the count and the villagers throw their backs into it with us, and demon-strength and farmer-stubbornness and one woman's voice drive the final beam home beneath the sawn supports and wedge it fast. We rope it.
We pack it. We hold the wounded dam together with our bodies and our will as the swollen river throws its whole murderous weight against us one last time—
"Hold!" I scream into the storm, and thirty voices scream it back at me, and I have never in my whole uncertain life belonged to anything the way I belong to this — soaked and bleeding and roaring on a broken dam beside a demon who crossed a battlefield to reach me, thirty farmers heaving as one against the death Pike built for them.
"Hold, Ashbrook, HOLD!" Malvek's ruined arm shakes under the strain and I brace my whole weight beside his and take what I can of the load, and for one impossible moment it is not a demon and a girl and a mob of frightened farmers at all.
It is one thing. One will. One valley refusing to drown.
—and the surge crests. And breaks. And begins, grudging inch by grudging inch, to fall.
The dam groans, and shudders, and holds.
It holds.
A ragged cheer goes up from thirty soaked and bleeding villagers, and I'm on my knees in the rain with Malvek's blood on my hands and my arms around as much of him as I can hold, and across the valley, in the flash of the lightning, I see a lone figure in his fine coat break from the fighting and run — Pike, abandoning his men, abandoning his scheme, fleeing into the black trees to save his own worthless skin now that his flood has failed him.
"Garrik!" I scream, and point.
And Garrik, bless his fierce old heart, is already moving — he and three farmers peeling off after the fleeing merchant, hunting him into the storm-lashed forest while the rest of us hold the line that Pike built his whole cruelty to break.