The Skeleth (30 page)

“That's the cost of the spell.” Edmund shrugged and smiled at Katherine's questioning look. “It's going to last awhile, I'm afraid.”

Gilbert's voice cried out from up the banks, and Katherine caught a glimpse of a volley arcing in from the north. A few missed the bridge completely, falling under the span or looping
high above it, but most must have struck home from the hoarse cries they raised. She heard the sounds of splashes—knights falling off the bridge into the river—and then louder ones, their horses falling with them.

Katherine called out for a volley, and then another, and for a moment dared to hope that she had driven off the army at a stroke. Then a voice bellowed from the dark—it was Wolland—and the sounds of panic on the bridge died away.

“Hold, everyone hold!” Katherine rushed past Martin and leaned out from the post of the bridge. The burning bales had already dwindled away to almost nothing, consumed by the power of Edmund's spell. She saw blood on the stone span, some fallen men and abandoned shields, but no one standing. One wounded knight staggered up and tried to leap over the smoldering bales, but tripped and cried out on his way down into the water.

Katherine waved back to the archers. “They're out of range; don't waste arrows.”

“What's going on up there? Are they running?” Lefric Green had barely time to say it before Gilbert's shout gave the answer.

“They're charging!” Gilbert called it twice along the banks. “At the bridge, there—they're charging!”

“Boys, up and ready!” Martin got his spear high and over the shoulder of the man before him. “Lower down, Horsa. Hold hard!”

“Draw and hold! No volleys yet!” Katherine raised her hand. She could not stop Gilbert's company, though, and did not mind the havoc they caused along the thin column coming
over the top of the bridge. She spared a brief moment to think that what her enemy tried was no small feat of horsemanship—and felt a prick of grief for the horses.

“Katherine, they're coming!” Someone whispered it from amongst the archers behind her. “Do we fire? Say the word!”

“Nock and draw.” Katherine held her arm high. “Wait.”

She watched the bridge. A column of knights thundered in twos, spurring their foaming steeds out of the dark. The beat of their hooves came deafening. Luilda Twintree started to whimper, and someone else in the square let his bow clatter down and turned to run.

“My lord—my lord, a chain!” The voice on the bridge rose to a wild shout, but too late. The front two men ran straight into it, and the men behind them smashed over, and for long, sickening moments there was nothing but the sound of screams, snapping bones and plunges down into the Tamber.

“Oh.” Luilda started to weep. “Oh, that's so—”

“Shut it!” Katherine flashed a hard look behind her. “Mill and square, another volley! All together, now—fire!”

Though there was no longer any light upon their targets, the archers of Moorvale had taken their gauge of the wind and had an entire column of knights amongst whom to drop their shots. The army's second advance turned all at once into a rout. Katherine hissed down her neighbors' cheers. “Not yet. Quiet! How many arrows have you got left?”

She heard some voices answer, “Just one,” others, “Two or three,” and then a few say, “Here, give me one, then, I'm out!”

“Keep them nocked,” said Katherine. “Wait on my word.”

“Men of Moorvale!” The voice boomed out from atop the bridge. “You have done nothing but rouse our anger at these tricks. You have turned but our vanguard, and now we march on you in earnest. We have hundreds of knights, and we will come across that bridge whether you fight us or not. Stand aside now and I may yet prevail upon my men to use some mercy.”

Katherine stepped to the banks before his words could do their work. “You argue without force, my lord Wolland. You have tried to take this bridge twice, and been turned back twice. We will teach you a third lesson if you are in truth so thick in the head.”

There was a long, long pause. “Katherine Marshal?”

“Good evening, my lord,” said Katherine. “I advise you to leave the field of battle as quickly as you can.”

“I will not be challenged by a peasant!”

“Why not?” Nicky Bird's voice sang out on the air. “You were just beaten by one!”

“My lord Wolland, you are defeated,” said Katherine. “We have the vantage and we will keep it. It's a long march back across those moors, so I suggest you get started.”

“You do not have the men to hold against us!” Lord Wolland lost his temper completely. “You do not even have the aid of your own lord!”

“Oh, do we not?” Katherine raised her voice to match him. “Look past our square, to the road, my lord, and see for yourself what is coming.”

She waited, hardly daring to breathe. She stared at the bulky
outline of Wolland's form atop his warhorse and could just catch his quiet talk with the men on the horses behind him.

“Come on, come on,” she whispered. “Swallow it whole.”

Edmund leaned to her shoulder. “If this doesn't work?”

“Then we run for our lives.” Katherine cast a look back at the approaching torches. They had come far enough along that she knew Lord Wolland could see that they were roughly one hundred strong, and marching in two columns—but if they got much closer, all was lost.

Lord Wolland turned his horse and rode back off the bridge in silence. The clatter of hooves on stone dwindled away.

Katherine threw her arms around a startled, blushing Edmund, then waved her hand behind her. “Now you can cheer, if you like.” Her neighbors drowned her out in the noise of it.

“Keep watch, though. They might still try something.” Katherine slapped Martin's shoulder, then stepped back amongst the archers. “Who can ride? I want one for Longsettle and one for Northend. I've got a horse we can use if someone can lend us another. We want arrows—tell them we'll pay from the village purse if they balk at it.”

“So Lord Harry's coming?” Hob Hollows waved out at the line of torches.

Katherine felt a smirk twitching up the corners of her lips. “He might come along eventually, but that's not him.”

“Then who is it?”

“Have a look.”

The torches came closer and closer, and before the nearest
had reached the square, a ripple of laughter had spread through the folk gathered there.

“Did it work?” Emma Russet led them, with Miles Twintree and a line of children, formed in two columns like soldiers on the march.

Katherine embraced her. “You sent an army running for the hills.”

“Scared off by a gang of kids.” Hugh Jocelyn guffawed so hard that he dropped his longbow. “So much for your battle-hardened men of war. Eh? Eh?”

The children approached in their lines toward the square two by two. As they got near to Edmund, the torches went out without so much as a hiss.

Edmund turned a sheepish smile on Katherine. “Saves having to douse them, I suppose.”

Miles Twintree dropped his snuffed torch on the road. “What'd we miss?”

“The finest shot in the history of all Moorvale.” Nicky Bird hopped out through the front door of the mill. “And some other things of lesser notice.”

Katherine let her neighbors whoop and embrace. She returned to the bridge and leaned on one of the grand stone pillars, and watched Wolland's army pull back out of view.

Edmund followed her into the square. “You did it.” His eyes sparkled with admiration. “That was the cleverest thing I've ever seen.”

Katherine turned to smile at him, but then caught sight of motion on the Longsettle road. “Are those more of the kids?”

“No, we're all here.” Miles turned to look back with her.
“I thought I heard noises from the south, just as we started marching.”

Folk approached along the road—on foot, and walking in a clump. A man stepped out before their ranks, a ragged, frightened peasant carrying a little boy in his arms. He stared about him at the folk of Moorvale assembled in the square. “So then, you must already know.”

Katherine glanced at Edmund, a hollow fear growing in her. She turned back to the man. “Know what?”

“There are monstrous creatures marching up from the south,” said the man. “There's panic on the roads—villages aflame. Elverain is under attack.”

T
hey're coming.” Jordan Dyer clambered up onto the barricade that had been hastily constructed from a line of wagons to block the road between his workshop and the inn. “Not but a mile off, now—they've already reached Ernald Green's and knocked the wall of his byre right through.”

Wat Cooper reached out a hand to help Jordan up over the mass of planks and spars that jutted from the wagons. “What do they look like?”

“Still like men, mostly—that's the worst part of it.” Jordan turned away from a volley of frightened questions, his handsome face ashen gray. “They're coming our way; that's all that matters now.”

Edmund traced out the design of the spell with one finger on his writing tablet, then glanced at the notes he had made on a loop of parchment. Every time someone looked his way, he gave an encouraging smile, but from the way they reacted, he knew that he was not convincing them of anything.

“I'll bet Lord Wolland's going to wait until he sees the Skeleth coming our way.” Geoffrey stood at Edmund's side, bow in one hand, cudgel in the other, his paltry store of arrows at his feet. “Then when we're busy holding them back, he'll try another charge, the coward.”

Edmund turned to look eastward at the shield wall. “Can Katherine stand them off again?”

“You let her do her job, and you do yours,” said Geoffrey. “How long will you need?”

“Not long, once I see them.” Edmund kept his gaze on the design of his spell, to avoid betraying how uncertain he felt.

“Edmund, Geoffrey, why won't you come away?” Sarra Bale tried again, for the fourth time that night, to tug her sons from their post. “Please, Edmund, if you come away, your brother will come, too. There's still time, there's still time to run!”

“Mum.” Edmund plucked her fingers gently away from him. “There is nowhere for us to run. Geoffrey knows that as well as I do. We must win tonight, so let me do my part.”

Harman Bale crossed over to meet them at the statue, pole in hand, though he still held the other on the wound in his gut. “There's only one reason to go to war, son—the defense of life and home.” He smiled. “So here we are.” He embraced both of his sons, and then did something Edmund had never seen him do out in the open before. He kissed Edmund's mother—on the mouth.

Geoffrey and Edmund stared at them, and then at each other. They kept staring, long after their father had left to man the barricades, and their mother had retreated, red in the face, to help Bella Cooper hand around the last of the supplies.

“Move those spears to the bridge, we don't need 'em here.” Jordan Dyer waved Molly Atbridge away from the barricade. A tight squad of men stood just behind the jutting beams on a pair of Gilbert Wainwright's wagons. Even as Edmund watched, Knocky Turner ran back and forth, banging more pieces onto the structure with desperate speed.

“Need anything else?” Miles Twintree hauled three quivers full of arrows past the statue, leading a petrified Emma Russet on toward the bridge.

“Not just now.” Edmund looked to his brother. “How many arrows have we got left?”

“You let me worry about shooting—keep your mind on your spell.” Geoffrey grabbed a handful of arrows from Miles.

“Edmund, I'm scared.” Emma Russet carried a bucket of water to quench the thirst of the archers, but trembled with such fright that a good amount of it had spilled onto her sleeves. “Do you think we can win?”

“We have to win.” Edmund looked about him, watching the two halves of Katherine's new and hastily improvised plan take shape. The folk on the barricades carried poles—many of them just garden tools with their metal points chopped off—for shoving the Skeleth away without killing the men they held trapped within them. While they held the Skeleth back, Katherine, Martin and a troop of village men would defend the shield wall across the bridge from anything else that Lord Wolland tried, backed by every archer that could be spared from other tasks. If everything went according to design, the whole of the force on the Longsettle road could swing around to the bridge once the Skeleth were gone.

All of that, of course, depended on Edmund. He looked about him, at his brother, his mother and his neighbors, then across the square at the girl he loved more than anything in the world. If he failed, none of them would live to see the dawn. He got back to work.

The Skeleth are seen and yet unseen. Trust your thoughts, not your eyes.
That seemed clear enough. The Skeleth were hard to see and impossible to touch. They could not be seized, the way the man within them could be seized. To reach them, he had to trust to what he knew of them. It was the same thing as knowing that eight plus thirteen was twenty-one. He could only seize the number twenty-one with his mind.

The Skeleth are shapes without substance. Right is left, up is down.
Edmund sketched out the boxy glyph for the Sign of Closing. To trap something that had no substance, he had to make a prison with no walls. The queen beneath the tower had shown him how—make a place where space folded in on itself, where going left was the same thing as going right. He glanced at the emptied-out strongbox he had taken from the inn. If the spell worked, the creatures would never be able to escape from its confines, but he wished he had been able to find a container that would be harder to break from without.

“Edmund, do you hear that?” Geoffrey turned east, toward the shadows swarming on the opposite bank of the river. “The army, it's marching again. They're coming back!”

Edmund shut the
Paelandabok
. “Watch this for me.” He strode across the square to the shield wall at the bridge. He found Katherine sitting with her arm around a boy of seven whose face he did not know.

“This is Diggory Twintree, Henry's nephew from down in Longsettle,” said Katherine. “The Skeleth harrowed his whole village—there's dead folk on the road, cut down at the verge and just left there. He says his father tried to make a stand, and now he's become one of them.”

Edmund turned toward the barricades facing south, then east across the river at Wolland's gathering forces. “First the Skeleth will destroy Wolland's enemies, and then they will betray him and consume his own army. History is about to repeat itself, if we don't find a way to stop it.”

Martin Upfield leaned on his spear. “The Longsettle folk were going to tell us that our best hope was to run east across the bridge, and try to make it to Wolland over the moors.” He pulled at his beard. “What've we done, Edmund? What've we done?”

Nicky Bird clutched his two remaining arrows, and no longer bothered to carry a quiver. “We can try running—west, into the mountains.”

Edmund shook his head. “We'd starve up there, or freeze in the winter snows.”

“And that's if the Nethergrim don't have more beasts up there waiting to rip us limb from limb,” said Martin.

“Then . . . north.” Nicky turned to look that way, toward the stands of shadowed trees that bounded the horizon. “We run north.”

“And then what, swim the Tamber?” Henry Twintree picked up his nephew in his arms. “Even if we made it across somehow, we'd end up in the Dorwood, and you know what folk say about that place.”

Nicky looked wildly around him. “Then . . . then, we're trapped.”

“That's it.” Telbert Overbourne threw down his spear. “I've got nothing to keep me here. I'm running south.”

Henry snorted. “Right at the monsters, eh?”

“Around them, if I can manage it.” Telbert waved to his wife. “Elsie, come on. It's all up for us. Let's go.”

Katherine grabbed Telbert by the arm. “Look across the river. Those are knights, men on horseback. Their blood is up, they're humiliated and they're looking for revenge. If we turn our backs on them, they will come across and run us all down.”

“Then what can we do?” Telbert clenched his hands. “What can we possibly do?”

Edmund looked across the river at the army gathered at the opposite footing of the bridge. A desperate hope seized him. He took up a militia spear someone had discarded, hopped the shield wall and raced out onto the span.

“Where are you going?” Katherine jumped up and leapt after him. “Edmund, wait, get back here! Have you gone mad?”

“Edgar of Wolland!” Edmund thumped the butt of his spear onto the stone of the bridge. “My lord Wolland, come forth! Come forth to parley!”

There was a space of silence, then laughter rolled across the river. A portly figure dressed in full armor stepped to the far edge of the bridge, flanked by guards bearing wide, heavy shields.

“You pretend to a rank far above you, boy!” Lord Wolland's voice was nearly lost in the echoes off the water. “To parley means to treat with a man worthy of command. I see no such man!”

Katherine hurried to his side near the apex of the bridge. “Edmund, this won't work. We've already made him angry and, worse yet, we've embarrassed him in front of his men. He'll never show us mercy now.”

“I have to try.” Edmund hauled in a full breath. “The Skeleth are not your allies, my lord! You have helped to free an ancient evil that cares nothing for the aims of men! They seek only destruction—they will betray you, as they betrayed King Childeric in ages past! You have played the fool and will earn a fool's wages!”

“You know nothing of what you speak!” came the shouted reply. “Do not think to improve your position with lies!”

“We are men and women—they are monsters!” Edmund raised his spear and waved it. “Let us cross in peace, and we will stand with you against them!”

The wind blew up along the channel of the Tamber, forcing Wolland to try three times to make his reply. “—folk of Moorvale, you have awakened my spite—run while you can—no quarter will be given—” The rest was blown away by a wind that flapped the banners stiff.

Martin joined Katherine and Edmund out on the span. “It was a game try, Edmund, but my cousin's right. Wolland's blood is up. He'll be making no peace tonight.”

“Men of Wolland! Men of Overstoke and Tand!” Edmund tried one last time, turning his voice to the troops of men and horses on the banks. “Your lord and commander has made a pact with the creatures of the Nethergrim! You stand on land made waste by the Skeleth long ago—do not help them ruin the rest of the north! Lord Wolland walks into a trap, and you
walk with him!” He waited, watching and listening, but could not be sure if his words had been heard.

Then came the answer. Sturdy as it was, with a sturdiness to last the centuries, the span of the bridge yet trembled with the roll of approaching hooves.