The Last Banner

Chapter 8: The Redoubt at Highwatch

A trace-chain in cold grease does not want to bend. It fights the knuckles like a dead eel, the iron links stiff with sheep-fat and road-grit.

"Hold the timber, Bren," Leon said. His voice was muffled, his forehead pressed right against the underside of the wagon-bed where the axle-tree was weeping sap.

Bren Ostler had his broad back wedged beneath the wagon's tail-board, his knees shaking in the mud, veins on his neck swollen like dock-leaves in summer. "Hurry it, Leon. My shoulder's slipping on the spruce."

"Don't talk. Just take the weight."

Leon laid his father’s blade along the split oak. The cold iron bit into the raw wood with a dull crunch. He took the heavy trace-chain, wrapped it once, twice, three times around both the timber and the length of the steel, then pulled the running end through the iron ring until the links ground together.

"Willem. The cold-chisel."

Willem Fen didn't stand up. He crawled through the black muck under the wagon, dragging his wrapped foot behind him like a bundle of rags, and shoved the flat chisel into Leon’s palm. The boy was trembling so hard his chin rattled against his collarbone, but he kept his fingers curled around the tool's head until Leon took the weight.

"Give me the hammer," Leon said to the carter.

The carter passed down the shoeing-hammer—short-handled, square-faced, scarred by twenty years of cold shoes.

Leon set the wedge between the chain-links and the flat of the sword. He didn't swing from the shoulder; there wasn't room between the axle and the granite flags for a full arc. He struck from the elbow, three short, heavy blows that rang with a hard, flat *clink-clink-clink*.

The iron gave. The chisel drove deep into the green heart of the oak, levering the chain so tight the wood groaned and squirted dirty sap over his knuckles. The sword bowed two inches, its ancient steel groaning under the strain, but it didn't snap. Salt Ford steel. It had taken a horse’s weight twenty years ago; it could take an axle-tree today.

"Up!" Leon shouted, rolling out from under the wheel into the drain-water. "Put the mules into the collar!"

The carter brought his leather crop down across the gray mule's rump with a wet crack. The beast lunged forward, its iron-shod hooves throwing sparks from the wet flags, and the powder wain lurched out of the gutter. The spliced axle creaked—a terrible, grinding noise of iron grinding on wood—but the wheel turned. One full circle. Two.

"Clear the lane!" the serjeant with the iron collar roared from the wicket.

Behind the wagon, thirty men of the rearguard tumbled through the gate, dragging three field-culverins on low sledges. They were black with soot, their wool surcoats shredded at the elbows, their breath coming in whistling gasps.

Cassian stood against the timber post, his iron pry-bar resting on the stone flags. He didn't watch the guns pass. He was looking down at the greasy smear in the mud where Leon’s father’s scabbard had been crushed into the gravel.

"You're Garrick's boy," the General said. It wasn't a question.

"I’m Leon," he said, wiping the axle-grease from his knuckles onto his thighs.

"He was an obstinate bastard at the river," Cassian said, his voice level, flat as a carpenter's rule. "Lost his arm because he wouldn't leave a broken pontoon-bolt in the current. He thought iron could save an army."

"It kept the wain rolling," Leon said.

Cassian’s pale gray eyes flicked to the gate, where the heavy oak portcullis was beginning to slide down its greased iron channels with a long, screaming rattle of chains.

"Iron doesn't save anything, boy," Cassian said. "Iron just buys minutes. A good smith knows when a piece is spent and throws it into the slag." He turned toward the inner camp, his leather jerkin creaking stiffly across his lean shoulders. "Take your two ditch-rats to the second horse-lines behind the store-barn. If I see them on the causeway before the fourth watch, the provost will hang them from the tail-gate of that wain."

He walked away into the smoke without looking back.

The second horse-lines were not a camp. They were a ditch between two turf-built fodder sheds where the Crown kept the mules that were too lame to haul and too tough to butcher.

Rain had begun to fall—not the soft, gray mists of Harrowden that made the barley swell, but the cold, needle-sharp sleet of the high eastern moors that cut through wool and made the lips turn blue.

Bren sat against an empty oats-barrel, his head slumped onto his chest, his boar spear lying across his knees like a dead bough. He had stopped shivering. That was the bad sign; Elena had told Leon twice that when a man stopped shivering in the wet, his blood was turning to pond-ice and his heart would quit before morning.

"Eat this," Leon said, pulling a piece of the dried salt pork from his pouch.

Bren didn't reach for it. "Tam’s dead, Leon."

Leon stopped, his thumb pressing the hard rind of the pork. "Who said that?"

"Corporal Karr. I saw him washing his billhook at the horse-trough. He said the pike-point took the cornet through the liver. Said the boy didn't even last until they got the brigandine off him." Bren looked up, his eyes yellow and dull in the gray sleet. "Tam's da had forty crowns, Leon. Forty crowns and five horses, and the boy died in an open cart with horse-dung under his hair."

"Tam was an officer," Leon said, shoving the meat into Bren’s fist and forcing the thick fingers closed over it. "Officers get killed first. Chew the fat. Don't spit it."

He turned to Willem Fen.

The boy was lying on a bundle of rotten rye-straw inside the shed, his left leg stretched out straight. The Vessian boot Leon had taken from the corpse was too big; Willem had stuffed dried moss into the toe, but the heel was soaked through with a thick, yellowish fluid that smelled of sour rennet.

Leon knelt in the straw. The mountain ash root in his tunic pocket felt cold against his ribs, like an icicle.

"Show me the heel, Willem."

"No," the boy whispered, his voice thin as an onion skin. "Don't touch it, Leon. It feels like someone's got a pair of hot tongs clamped on the bone."

"I have to see if the thread held."

"She didn't use thread," Willem whimpered, pulling his knees up toward his chest. "She used horse-hair. She boiled it in the vinegar-pot. It pulls, Leon. Every time the foot twitches, it pulls on the meat."

Leon didn't argue. He reached into his belt, pulled his small forge-knife—the one he used for trimming horn-cuttings—and sliced the top two inches of the Vessian boot down the back seam.

The smell that came out of the leather made his stomach heave.

The heel wasn't white, and it wasn't red. It had gone the dull, purple-gray color of a drowned calf's tongue. The three stitches Elena had set were still there, holding the gray flaps of skin together, but the flesh around them had puffed up tight and glossy, weeping a clear, oily water that didn't stop.

Rule two, Elena’s voice came back to him, clear and sharp as the chapel bell at Harrowden. Clean beats clever. Boil the linen, boil the needle, boil your hands. Dirt kills slower than steel and just as sure.

There was no boiling water in the horse-lines. There was only the freezing rain dripping off the turf eaves and an iron kettle half-full of rancid mutton-grease the mule-drivers had left by the door.

Leon reached into his pouch, found the little scrap of clean linen Father Ansel had given him with the church-dirt inside, and shook the earth out into the straw.

"Bren," Leon said, not looking back.

Bren chewed slowly on the pork, his jaw moving like an ox. "Aye?"

"Find a brand from the carters' fire. A dry one. Red at the tip."

Bren stopped chewing. His eyes went wide. "Leon... you can’t."

"The flesh is rotting, Bren. If the rot gets into the shin-bone, Willem dies before we reach the river. Go get the iron."

"He's Willem," Bren choked out. "We fished the mill-race with him, Leon. You can't put fire to him."

"Get the brand," Leon said, his voice dropping into that quiet, terrifying register his father used when the iron was white-hot and the apprentice had his hand on the wrong side of the anvil. "Or hold him down while I do it with the knife."

Bren looked at Willem, whose teeth were chattering so hard a fleck of blood had appeared on his lower lip. Then the big boy stood up, his shoulders hitting the low lintel of the shed, and stumbled out into the sleet toward the braziers.

Willem reached out with both hands, his fingers clawing into the wool of Leon’s tunic. His grip was remarkably strong for a boy who couldn't stand.

"Don't let him, Leon," Willem begged, his breath hot and sour against Leon’s ear. "Tell Elena. She's got the little green jars in the shed. The ones that smell like mint. She puts the green grease on it and the fire goes away."

"Elena is four leagues back, Willem," Leon said softly, laying his rough palm against the boy’s burning forehead. "She's at the river."

"She’s got the ring," Willem mumbled, his eyes rolling toward the thatched roof where the rain was leaking through. "She had it on the cord. I saw it when she bent over my shoe. Plain silver. No stone. She said gold was for women who needed convincing..."

His voice trailed off into a dry, whistling rattle.

Bren came back through the door with an iron tire-iron from the wheelwright's heap. The tip wasn't cherry-red; it was a dull, angry orange that hissed as the raindrops struck the metal.

"I took it off the brazier," Bren whispered, his face white under the dirt. "The carter tried to hit me with his whip. I took it anyway."

Leon took the iron by the cold end. The weight of it was familiar—two pounds of square bar, forged for leverage, not balance.

"Sit on his chest, Bren," Leon said.

"Leon—"

"Sit on his chest and put your forearm across his mouth. If he screams, the provost’s guard comes to see if we're killing a horse, and they'll throw him in the dead-trench to save the straw."

Bren dropped his great knees into the straw on either side of Willem’s ribs, pinned the boy’s shoulders down with his weight, and clamped his left forearm hard across Willem’s mouth.

Leon didn't look at Willem’s eyes.

He laid the edge of the horn-knife along the swollen seam of the heel, made two quick, shallow cuts to let the yellow water drain into the peat, and then pressed the flat face of the tire-iron against the gray flesh.

The sound was like wet leather dropped on an anvil.

Willem’s entire body bowed off the straw, his spine arching with a violent, animal spasm that nearly threw Bren off his chest. A smell filled the little shed—thick, greasy, sweet, and terrible—the smell of Harrowden wool burning in the forge, mixed with the stench of the slaughter-pens.

Willem didn't scream through Bren’s arm. He made a low, bubbling grunt, then went limp as a wet sack.

Leon threw the iron into the mud outside the door, where it went out with a sharp, angry spit. His hands were shaking. Not from the cold; the muscles in his forearms were jumping like dry twitches in a loom.

He took the clean linen strip, bound it tight around the charred heel, and tucked the foot back into the straw.

"Is he dead?" Bren asked, his voice shaking.

"No," Leon said, his chest heaving. "He fainted. That's good. He won't feel the frost for an hour."

A horn blew from the ramparts—not the three blasts of the levy, and not the iron trumpet of the Vessian foot.

It was three long, descending notes: *the retreat from the outer ditch.*

Through the open door of the shed, Leon saw the first wagons of the main army rolling past down the north road. They weren't moving in order. Carters were cutting the harness on dead beasts, dumping barrels of salt pork into the ditches to lighten the loads, and beating their teams with iron chains to clear the narrow bridge over the river.

Behind them, on the high timber gate of Eastvale, a line of black smoke was rising.

Not from the enemy’s torches.

A file of royal sappers was running along the parapet with buckets of pitch, setting fire to their own towers. Cassian wasn't going to hold the ditch until the fourth watch. He was burning the works behind him to keep the Vessian cavalry from using the causeway before the King's reserve could reach the river-forts.

And between the burning gate and the crowded bridge, three thousand boys from the valley levies were running through the sleet, with no pikes in their hands and no officers to tell them which road led home.