Accidental Sorceress (Hardstorm Saga Book 2) (31 page)

“Tomorrow we shall take back the castle, my lady,” Lord Brooker told me as he passed by.

I worried about that, about how many would die in the fight. But I did not worry about the night. I thought we would be safe in the mine.

We were not.

I woke in the middle of the night to a great din at the mouth of the tunnel. Both tigers were gone from my side. Orz stood by my feet, facing away from me with his sword drawn, ready to protect me.

I caught sight of Lord Karnagh running toward the sound of battle cries, and shouted to him, coming to my feet. “What is it?”

“A roving band of mercenaries found us, my lady.”

I stared after him as he ran to fight in the dark.

Of course.
Why had I not expected this? A thousand people walking through snow left a wide trail. If any enemy came across that, they would come to investigate. All they had to do was follow our tracks. Since they had no young and no sick, they had caught up with us easily.

But even if I had not anticipated attack, it seemed Lord Karnagh and Lord Brooker had, for as I hurried forward to see what was happening, I could see they had left full half of our warriors guarding the entrance of our tunnel and they had the attack well in hand.

Swords clashed, men sounded battle cries, and tigers roared. I could see some of the enemy, but in the dark, I could not make out how many of them were outside, seeking to fight their way in.

I spotted Tomron in the scant moonlight. He was dragging an injured warrior my way. “All he needs is the bleeding stemmed. Save your strength, my lady.” Then he hurried off, leaving the man at my feet.

“It is nothing, my lady.” The warrior clutched his side.

Blood spurted through his fingers, appearing black in the night.

I bent to him. “Let me see.”

A woman appeared at my elbow with a torch the next second. Then another brought water and my bag of herbs. And another rushed up and began tearing the bottom of her long skirt into strips.

I bandaged up the gash the best I could, then the next wound and the next. Our losses were much lighter than the enemy’s, the injured men told me. We had the protection of the tunnel. But no matter how many enemy our warriors cut down, the fight raged on and on, until the light of dawn.

Only then did we realize that faced not a roving band of mercenaries, but an entire army unit.

Chapter Twenty-Four

(Brooker’s Castle)

Despite our warriors’ best efforts, the enemy pushed inside. The women carried the injured deeper into the mineshaft, three or four to a man. I splinted broken limbs and stemmed bleeding with my herbs.

For a moment, it seemed we might be able to stand against the tide, but then fresh enemy soldiers moved to the front, and they pushed us back another distance. And again and again.

We were half-frozen from the long night, none of us had eaten that day yet, nor did we have any more water once they pushed us past the trickle that ran down the tunnel wall. We had but a handful of torches.

We drew back like an injured snake, in staggered sections, the women carrying the wounded, then resting, hoping our warriors would hold the line at last, then moving again when the enemy attacked more fiercely.

We progressed through the dark shaft like that through an endless day, until one of the women hurried back to me from the deepest reaches.

“We cannot go farther, my lady.” She fought back frightened tears.

I went to investigate.

Here the tunnel branched off into a dozen directions, and our people had poured in. As they were all packed in, unable to move farther, I knew these were all blind tunnels that dead-ended.

A timber door closed off the main tunnel, fortified with wrought iron bands. Even when several of us pushed, it would not yield. The door was somehow barred from the other side.

The sounds of fighting filled the air, mixing with the sounds of dying. I looked back at the frightened women, and our warriors behind them, fighting, falling.

My stomach churned, my heart heavy inside my chest.
I
had led these people here. We were all doomed to the grave. What healing powers I had were no help with this, nor my ability to sing songs to animals and sometimes make them listen.

Here, so close to our goal, was an obstacle we could not overcome. Here our valiant quest would end.

I wanted to cry out for the spirits’ help, but I was afraid what would answer down here in the deep.

I looked at the torch in my hand. If we tried to burn the wood of the gate, the smoke would fill the tunnel and kill us all. Then I thought of a better solution.

I turned and ran toward the fighting men. “I need the men from the villages who brought their axes.”

The word spread, and one such man appeared, then another. Soon I had a dozen. “Follow me.”

As soon as they saw the gate, they knew why I had called them and fell on the great obstruction with all their strength. Wood beams creaked and splintered. Chunks as thick as my arm split away.

But when a hole had been cut in the gate, we did not see freedom on the other side. We saw a stone wall.

The enemy that had taken the castle had discovered the secret of Lord Brooker’s disappearance and had walled in the tunnel to protect from just such an attack as we had planned.

The fighting mass of warriors reached closer and closer.

The women and the children, the injured and the old crowded around me, their desperate cries filling my ears.

“Save us, Sorceress!”

If only I had the powers they thought I possessed. I regretted bitterly not disabusing them of their high opinions of me before, not insisting that I was nothing but a healer.

I could not sing down stones.

Yet, as I looked at the desperate eyes, all dark in the dim, flickering light of the torches, I could not tell them that all was lost, I could not say
prepare to perish
.

I blinked back tears of desperation, and scanned the mine shaft. There had to be other branches. Even a small opening somewhere. We had to run and hide. The enemy would not find all of us in the dark. Some of our people might live.

But even as I thought that, I knew what would happen to those who escaped the enemy. They would starve and freeze down here.

Babes cried in their mothers’ arms. The mothers rocked them, looking at me, waiting for me to save them. I closed my eyes, for I could no longer look upon their faces.

A true sorceress could bring down the wall.
How?

In my frustration, I turned and struck it with my bare fist, which accomplished nothing but bruising my flesh. The wall was thoroughly unmovable.

My breath caught.
Or was it?

The Kerghi were not city builders. They were horseback people who lived for war, all soldiers, marauding from one corner of the world to the other. They had no stonemasons among them.

Which meant that the wall before me had been erected by the castle’s stonemasons, no doubt forced by the Kerghi. But would the castle’s stonemasons not leave a path for future escape?

I pulled my little paring knife and attacked the mortar. Not much happened at first. But then I hit a soft spot.

I tested the mortar, and the blade slid right in. I scraped some out, rubbed it between my fingertips, smelled it. And realized that some of the stones were held in place by fine gravel mixed with half-frozen wax.

I needed something long and thin to work that wax out. “Hand me a dagger.”

One of the women grabbed one from a fallen soldier and rushed it to me. I attacked the wall with all my strength and, after some struggle, removed a stone, then another.

Once a hole appeared, our men had someplace to wedge their axes and collapsed the rest.

The passageway’s opening saved us from imminent death at the hand of the Kerghi soldiers who had pushed us to the tunnel’s end, but not for long. Even as we rejoiced, our predicaments worsened.

Within a few steps, we found ourselves in the castle’s dungeons, which were filled with men the enemy had taken captive. They were under full guard, and the guard sounded the alarm as soon as they saw us.

And then suddenly we faced enemy fighters on both sides.

Some of our warriors rushed to meet the new threat. Prisoners cried from their overcrowded cells, reaching through the bars, filthy, bloody hands, fingers disjointed from torture.

I saw the jailer—an old man with a whip and a row of keys on his belt—pressing himself into an indentation in the rock wall, trying to stay away from all the sharp swords around him.

“Marga!” I called the tiger.

And she appeared next to me.

I climbed on her back and directed her toward the jailer. “That one.”

And as if she knew my mind, Marga rushed forward.

The fighting men cleared out of her way.

Then I was at the jailer, Marga’s head level with the man’s face. She showed her fearsome teeth.

The man whimpered as he soiled himself.

“The keys,” I demanded.

He threw the key ring at me, then covered his face with his trembling hands.

Back to the cells we went, and I slid off Marga’s back. While I worked on the locks, one after the other, releasing the prisoners, the tiger protected me. No enemy dared to come near.

The prisoners joined the fight with whatever they could first grab, a loose brick here, a chunk of wood there, a bucket. Then, as the enemy fell, the prisoners grabbed better weapons from the fallen.

The Kerghi who had followed us into the tunnel were defeated to the last man. Then our joined forces turned to the enemy inside the castle. And at long last, they too fell back.

Our warriors followed them up the stairs. The women and children, the old and the injured stayed in the dungeons. I stayed with them and healed.

We lost men. Too many. But many I could help.

I was still dressing wounds when one of Lord Brooker’s men ran back down, covered in blood, gasping for air. “A message from Lord Brooker, my lady. We have the castle.” And then he promptly collapsed.

I hurried to close the gash in his side.

When I finished with the last patient, I ran up the stairs to the castle yard. I looked upon the dead, the blood-soaked stones below my feet. Then at our men, smiles on their faces. We had the castle.

I turned around, dazed, and found Marga and Tigran together in a quiet corner, lying near each other, panting with exhaustion but with no serious injuries.

Lord Karnagh appeared at my side, holding a bloody lance. Maybe that was easier to maneuver left-handed than a sword would have been. “Marga fought well,” he said. “From the looks of her, I would say she has some of Bloodstorm’s blood in her, my lady.”

“Is it truly over?”

“The castle is ours.” Lord Karnagh beamed. “But I believe you had bigger plans.”

I could not think about that now. “I need water boiled and as much clean cloth as possible cut into bandages. I would tend the wounded.”

* * *

That night, we feasted. Lord Brooker’s men found the larders full. The enemy had laid in ample stores for the winter, food stolen from the villages. But our feast was a mix of joy and sorrow. We lost over fifty men.

At least the walking wounded had not been so badly injured that I could not heal them. And we gained two hundred more warriors from the dungeons and other locked pits of the castle. The enemy had been planning to sell them at the slave markets of Muzarat in the spring.

They were skin and bones, but I expected a few weeks of three good meals a day would do wonders for them.

That night, I slept the sleep of the dead.

The next day’s task was to take stock—of our people, of our supplies, of the castle. Teams were immediately assigned to the burial of the bodies. Since the ground was frozen, they were given to fire.

Another team worked on walling the tunnel back up again, without wax this time. We did not want the enemy to intrude among us through there.

Lord Karnagh and Lord Brooker talked to the prisoners, who told tales of battles fought far and near. At first, I sat in those meetings with the men, but the darkness they spoke of I could not long bear, so I went around the castle with Marga and Orz to see who needed my help.

I had enough wound dressings to change for the work to last all day, even with help. But as the days passed, the wounds healed.

Orz turned out to be a great helper. He was strong enough to lift the most badly injured, turn them over, move them. He carried bucket after bucket of water for me.

And when I worked myself into exhaustion, he would even carry me, to the bedchamber Lord Brooker had kindly given me. Orz was offered lodgings too, but he would have none of that. He slept outside my door on the cold hard stones instead.

The first men, nearly a dozen, appeared in front of our gate a week after we had regained the castle. They had women with them and one child, a newborn babe. They called up to tell us that they were from the other side of the Silver River, had been hiding in the woods. They had overheard Kerghi soldiers fleeing in the night and knew that the castle was now held by free men.

Lord Brooker had the gate opened for them.

Two days later, another small group came. Then another and another, as if the birds themselves were spreading the news.

Then small groups of Selorm soldiers arrived here and there, those left behind for dead on battlefields, then later recovered, those who escaped enemy ambushes.

By the next mooncrossing, the castle could not hold us all. Soldier camps had to be set up outside the castle walls, tents upon rows of tents.

I began to fear that our food stores, as plentiful as they were, would not be sufficient.

But the soldiers hunted. The villagers went as far as the river for fishing. One way or the other, we were able to feed the great host of people who gathered.

Before I knew it, we had a full army.

Lord Karnagh, Tomron, and I were standing on the parapets, looking at the warriors training on the new grass. We were, at last, at winter’s end.