The Scribes' Lead and the Parapet's Steel

The forge in the lower tower didn't go out for six days. Bruno had peat charcoal brought up, iron from the mines and two carts of holm oak, and the great bellows, the ones the torrent drove, blew day and night on the hearth with a roar you could hear from the courtyard. Brianda measured the trunnions of the gun carriages with a carpenter's compass; Ciro and his three apprentices hammered plates to armor the lower embrasures, and whenever one of them drifted off, Ciro cuffed him and told him what he had been told at that age: three degrees less and it cools, three more and it cracks, and don't stop to think about it.

"Sixteen isn't going to happen," Brianda said on the fourth night, wiping soot off with the back of her arm. "Twelve. And one of the twelve frightens me: the bore came out with a bubble."

"We'll put that one where there's no one beside it."

"There's nowhere on the wall walk where there's no one beside it, Bruno."

Bruno plunged the red-hot piece into the brine tub and the forge filled with steam. When it cleared, Brianda was looking at him with the face she wore when she knew he was about to do something foolish.

"I'll fire it myself," said Bruno.

"We'll fire it together," she said. "We already know what happens when you let go of something to save me."

In the archive tower, by the light of rapeseed lamps, Tomás and Beatriz had spent three nights taking apart the viceroy's letter and the dispatches Íñigo's men had taken from a vanguard courier.

"The seal is a minor chancery seal," said Tomás, pointing to the border with his stylus. "No countersignature from the Council. The king hasn't signed this war. He has nothing to sign it with: he's owed the Genoese three million since Italy."

"Then who is paying for it?"

Beatriz spread on the table accounts that shouldn't have been there: bills from an exchange house in Antwerp, payments to Rhineland captains, purchases of powder. She had found them sewn into the lining of the courier's bag.

"The three border families who lost the river toll when Sira broke the chain," she said. "The wheat speculators of Burgos who haven't collected a tithe since the concord. And an Antwerp house that signs its bills with a name I don't know and long esses I do." Her voice hardened. "The king isn't paying for this war. The men who lost the river toll are."

"And your father holds their pen."

Íñigo, who had come up with a dispatch from the forest posts, stood in the doorway listening. For ten years he had been glad to know nothing of his uncle. Now he realized that, deep down, he had been waiting for this: for the same round hand that signed the letters on his saint's day to sign another war. Irati, beside him, squeezed the wrist of his bad arm without a word.

"My father always knew the pen is worth more than the sword. What he never understood is that it's worth as much to other people." Beatriz took out another letter, this one with the seals of ten councils. "The guilds of Burgos, Valladolid and Soria refuse to sell powder and ironwork to that army. If we hold for five days, the Rhineland pikemen run out of pay. And a mercenary without pay isn't a soldier: he's a man who remembers he has a home."

Rodrigo arrived at the archive after midnight, with Leonor and a map under his arm. He spread it over the Antwerp accounts without asking. It was the map of the Silent Lands, the one the two of them had drawn on the saddle ten years before, with the nameless spur and the maze of crevasses marked in red.

He wrote on the slate and passed it to Leonor.

"He says the bulk of the army is coming up the lower gorge, with the artillery," Leonor read. "That they'll send riders to the ford of the Arlanza to cut off the river. And that someone has shown them the pass of the Three Sisters."

"No one outside Oakhaven knows that pass," said Tomás.

Rodrigo wrote again. This time he passed the slate straight to Beatriz.

The chancellor knew it. He was the one who had my tongue burned for refusing to erase it.

Beatriz looked at the slate for a long time. Then she sent for Íñigo, Irati, Nerea and Lope, and before dawn two parties were ready: one to go down to the river with Sira and Nuño, and another to climb the glacier with a mute cartographer and a map the enemy thought it knew.