The Night of a Thousand Torches

On the night of the ninth day, the valley caught fire. At midnight, thousands of pitch torches flared at once along the enemy trenches, a serpent of fire ringing the mountain from the ford of the Poplars to the western crags, and the viceroy's culverins opened fire on the lower barbican with a roar that set the hall's windows trembling. It was the noise they wanted heard. What mattered that night was happening in two other places, in silence.

Two leagues downriver, among the willows on the bank, Sira's flotilla waited with its decks covered in fir branches and its gunwales lined with soaked felt. Four flat-bottomed barges, without a single light. Further down, the viceroy's sappers had spent the day laying two pontoon bridges to move their convoys of powder and grain to the north bank.

"The sentries are asleep by the braziers," whispered Nuño, who had swum down along the bank to look. "The powder barrels are on the south bank, under canvas. And there's one awake. Just one."

"One shouts as loud as twenty," said Sira.

She touched the amber through her shirt, as she always did before the Friar's Leap, and cast off. The barges drifted with the current, close to the reed beds, without a single oar stroke. When the waking sentry saw the shadows, Nuño was already on the pontoon with twenty bargemen and their axes. The shout was cut off halfway. The hawsers holding the pontoons to the banks fell into the water one after another.

Sira had the jars of burning pitch thrown onto the canvas on the bank. They took a minute to catch and then caught all at once. The reserve barrels exploded in a chain of dry thunderclaps; the pontoons, loose and burning, went off downriver like pyres, lighting the cliffs a dirty gold. The artillery draft horses broke their harness and bolted across the mud flats.

Nuño jumped back onto the barge, smoke-blackened to the eyebrows.

"Are you ever going to let me go back to your cellar without a river on fire?" Sira asked him, turning toward the backwater.

"I told you I don't know how to pray," he answered. "But I row well."

At the same hour, four leagues away, on the glacier of the Three Sisters, it was so cold that breath fell to the ground as frost.

Rodrigo went in front, sounding with his iron-shod staff. Behind him came Leonor, Nerea, Lope, Íñigo with his stiff arm and Irati with her bow, and forty clansmen loaded with ropes, picks and stones. And at the end, complaining about his knees at every step, came Jarek, who had said he wouldn't stay below even if they tied him up.

The viceroy's detachment—three hundred men with guides bought in Burgos and a copy of the queen's old portolan—was climbing along the old line, the one that ran straight toward the third Sister. Straight into the maze of crevasses. Rodrigo had foreseen it in the archive: whoever had copied the map didn't know the glacier had come down in three hundred years.

But the guides weren't fools. When they saw the first crevasses they stopped, and the officers began to look for the spur. The nameless spur, the one Rodrigo had marked on the true map. If they found it, by morning there would be three hundred men at Oakhaven's back.

"It has to be closed," said Lope. "And someone has to stay at the mouth of the spur while it's closed, so they don't climb up first."

"I'll stay," said Jarek.

Nerea turned to him.

"Don't even dream of it."

"Girl, I'm seventy-one and I've no knees left to go down that glacier again." The old man sat on a stone and spanned his crossbow with the calm of a weather report. "Your mother made me promise I wouldn't let you do anything foolish. I'll do this one myself, and that way I keep my word."

Nerea wanted to argue. Lope put a hand on her shoulder. Íñigo and Irati were already climbing with the clansmen toward the edge of the spur, where the old snow hung in a cornice over the only way through.

It took them an hour to cut the cornice with their picks. Throughout that hour, from the mouth of the spur, they could hear Jarek's crossbow, slowly, with the patience of a man who had spent his whole life counting things before he said them: a shot, a long pause, another shot. Then the cornice gave way with a report and fell over the pass like a sheet, and after that nothing more was heard.

At dawn, the viceroy's detachment was turning back down the glacier the way it had come.

Jarek didn't come down.