The Night of Broken Glass

The tolling of the great tower bell was no measured vesper chime; it was a frantic, discordant clamor, beaten out by a terrified brother in the belfry with an iron bar. Black smoke from the burning stables already masked the inner court as Irene reached the spiral stair of the grand gallery.

The assault broke two hours before midnight, just as the waning crescent sank behind a heavy bank of leaden frost-clouds. No war horns sounded; the first warning was the high scream of fire-pots flung from the dry ditch engines below.

The three hundred diamond panes of the grand gallery—hauled in straw from Venice a century back—shattered inward with a single thunderous roar. A hail of multicolored crystal shards and boiling pitch showered the corridor rugs, setting the tapestries of the Snow Dynasty ablaze in roaring sheets.

Irene ran along the passage through rolling clouds of choking tallow smoke that burned her throat. All around, serving lads fled toward the buttery vaults while crossbolts snapped through hanging damask. The screams of yeomen and the deafening clatter of swords biting mail echoed up the winding turnpike stairs.

Irene saw a chamberlain in a gold-embroidered doublet kneeling under a table, clutching his staff of office like a crucifix. When the palace glass was bursting into shards, no rank could save anyone who didn't know how to hold a blade.

She wheeled around the landing of the keep and found Fadrique at bay. The prince wore his dented field harness, gripping a heavy warsword with both bare gauntlets. At his boots lay three men-at-arms of Morvath's household guard, their wolf tabards slick with crimson and their heaters split end to end.

"Irene!" Fadrique roared, his throat raw with soot and his eyes wide with battle fever. "I ordered you down to the cellar vaults with the kitchen folk and drop the oak beam!"

"And I told you I take no orders from heirs who let themselves be cornered beneath their own rafters!" she snapped back, scooping up a steel stirrup-crossbow and a quiver of short bolts dropped by a fallen sergeant beside the balustrade.

Fadrique had no breath to argue: two billmen burst through the smoke wielding barbed poles. The prince ducked the first lunge with an agile sidestep and drove the pommel of his sword into the visor of the second, hurling him back into the smoldering carcass of a walnut sideboard.

Morvath stepped through the smoke at the far end of the gallery, flanked by twenty armored retainers bearing heavy pavises and blackened cuirasses. In his left hand he brandished a pitch-soaked brand; in his right, the iron rod with which he meant to seize the northern seals.

"Yield, nephew!" the archduke thundered, his eyes wild beneath his raised visor. "The imperial vanguard holds the causeway! Your mountain sorcery cannot withstand the king’s powder and fire, nor buy the spine of your freezing yeomanry!"

Fadrique lunged forward, throwing his broad shoulders between the crossbolts and the girl. The gash across his right collarbone bled hot and dark, steaming as it struck the frigid draft, yet his stance held rock-steady upon the glass-strewn floor.

"Oakhaven was never yours to sell to southern usurers, Morvath," the prince rasped, leveling his tip to the throat of the foremost sergeant. "And if I must fall upon this floor, I shall see you tread the ditch ahead of me to warm the pit."

Three quarrels hissed through the smoke. Fadrique turned the first with a ringing parry that showered blue sparks; the second glanced off his pauldron tearing brass rivets, but the third sliced his thigh, driving him to one knee upon the bloody flags.

Irene did not shriek nor flinch. She set her boot into the stirrup, hauled the heavy cord back until the nut clicked, skinning her knuckle, and leveled the stock at the crossbowman lining up the kill against the prince's unarmored throat.

The iron trigger tripped with a dull snap. The short bolt whipped through the haze, pinning the sergeant’s shoulder straight through the oak casing of the ruined lancet.

Fadrique glanced back from the floor, blood smearing his jaw and a wild, unbroken fire lighting his gray eyes.

"You shoot passably true for a scrivener's lass," he breathed, dragging himself upright with brutal resolve that bunched every muscle in his back.

"I told you I know how to mend bad covenants, Fadrique. Now let us finish this before they lay fire to the scriptorium."

Shoulder to shoulder, they charged the spearmen trying to force the landing portal, hurling them down the steep steps into the snowbound bailey below where the final contest raged.