The Siege of a Hundred Fires

The smoke of the siege fires rose from the valley floor in greasy columns, and by vespers you could no longer see the river. From the highest wall walk of Oakhaven, Queen Elenora counted the fires again. A hundred. The Duke of Valtierra had brought ten thousand pikemen and arquebusiers from the south, dug trenches in a ring around the fortress and closed every pass. For forty days no flour had entered Oakhaven.

She was twenty-three and had reigned for two winters, since her father drowned at the ford of the Arlanza with half his guard behind him. She had learned the trade fast: she slept with a dagger under her pillow, ate the same black bread as the sentries and knew the name of every archer in the embrasures. That morning she had helped amputate the leg of a fifteen-year-old boy in the infirmary, and there was still dried blood under her nails.

When it was over, the boy had grabbed her sleeve with the hand that was still steady. Are we going to win, my lady? She had told him yes, because a queen can say nothing else in front of a boy with no leg, and she had spent the whole afternoon with that yes stuck in her throat like a fishbone.

Beside her, Lord Kieran of Valdelobos gripped the hilt of his greatsword, knuckles white. He was her master-at-arms and had been, before that, the boy who taught her to ride, the one who guarded her back in her first skirmish, the one who slept across the tower corridor when there were traitors at court. He had never told her the rest. There was no need: all Oakhaven knew it, and all Oakhaven knew that a queen does not marry her commander.

"Valtierra's envoy has crossed the bridge again," he said. "He gives you until the bell for compline. If you don't open the gates and accept marriage to the duke before the southern bishop, they will set fire to the lower palisades and put the wounded to the knife."

"Valtierra doesn't want a wife. He wants a signature to empty the mines, fell the larches and put my people in the south's perpetual census." Elenora ran her hand over the frozen stone of the merlon. "If I sign, in ten years there won't be a free shepherd left in the range."

"If you don't sign, tomorrow there won't be anyone."

She didn't answer at once. She looked north, to where the clouds were piling up over a black peak with smooth slopes and seven crags in a crown like the teeth of a jaw. The shepherds called it the Seven Eyes and never climbed it.

"Tonight we won't go down into the moat," she said. "We'll go up there."

Kieran went pale under his wind-browned skin. He put his hand to his chest, the old mountain gesture against the evil eye.

"That mountain has been forbidden since the first settlers. They say the heart of the frost sleeps there and that the well grants what it's asked, but it always collects."

"That's why I'm the one going." Elenora turned to him. "A crown's debt is paid by whoever wears it."

She asked him for two horses at the cliff postern, a rope, blankets, a resin torch and a guide who knew the gorge of the Black Wind. Kieran knelt on the granite, took her gloved hand and kissed her knuckles. It was all he allowed himself.

"As far as it takes, my queen."

Elenora watched him walk away toward the stair with his usual stride, favoring his left side a little from the old knee wound. She thought of calling him back. She thought of telling him to stay, to send someone else, that there was no need for a commander to climb a cursed mountain to watch his queen die. She didn't call him. It was the last night she would have to choose between what she wanted and what she owed, and she chose as she always had.

When he had gone down the spiral stair, Elenora went to the chapel and wrote a letter to the seneschal Mauricio: what to do with the grain that was left, who should rule until her brother Bermudo came of age, where her mother's silver was buried. She sealed it with the seal of the seven eyes and left it on the altar.

Kieran, meanwhile, went to find the guide. He found her in the stable of the refugee shepherds: Uxía, a girl of fourteen with legs like vine shoots and a tongue quicker than the goats. While she saddled the horses, he asked her, the way one asks about the weather, what they said in her village about the well of the Seven Eyes.

"That it grants what you ask," said Uxía without looking at him. "And that it takes a warm heart in payment. The first one it finds."

Kieran stood still beside the horse for a while. Then he went to the armory and chose the thickest cloak he had, the one lined with wolf fur. It wasn't for him.