Free The Bandit King by Lilith Saintcrow Page B

fleeing
Père
’s wrath. As usual.
    My son must be above even the appearance of such things!
    And my mother, in her gentle way:
Perseval, he is a boy.
Intercession I craved and was shamed of at once, for a man does not hide behind a woman’s skirts.
    That was something my father said often as well.
    So it was a collection of dusty half-remembered passages, navigating by memory and touch in some dark places, until I found the spiraling, forgotten stone stairs rising through the disused part of the West Tower. There was precious little chance of attack from this quarter since the Keep’s back was to the cliffs, but my father would have posted guard in the parts of the Tower still accessible from other areas of the Keep.
    He believed in being thorough.
    Three-quarters of the way up the Tower was a gallery where I could see the Keep and the city below. This would give me valuable information—and also, in that gallery, there would be water. At least, if the pipes had not been blocked in the intervening years.
    Vianne.
    I pushed up the trapdoor, wincing as it groaned. The gallery was empty, and my legs threatened to shake as I emerged into dusk. Time moves strangely to the imprisoned, and I was faintly shocked to find the sunlight dimming.
    The roar of battle was much more pronounced. I hauled myself out and lay on the gallery’s dust-choked floor, breathing heavily and staring at the lavender sky through tall narrow windows shielded by rotting wooden eaves.
    When my lungs finally bore more resemblance to flesh than leather bellows, I dragged myself upright and crossed the gallery, shuffling through a thick carpet of dust. None of the windows were broken—this face of the tower was relatively sheltered—but a few were cracked, and all were dirty. It took much careful peering and polishing before I fully grasped what I saw.
    Below, the other towers of the Keep jutted like white spears. The city of Arcenne huddled, a thicket of burning inside its confining walls. The
Quartier Gieron
blazed. The eastron half was all a-smolder, and the strip of di Roncail’s Orchard—so it was called, though there had not been a Roncail alive for a good fifty years—along the wall was aflame with fire instead of blossom. The East Tower, its angle providing enfilade fire with the battlements and its back to a high-shouldered cliff, flew a tattered red flag proudly, the mountain-pard of Arcenne clawing defiantly as the pennant flapped. The West Tower, more vulnerable because of the fields at its foot and the wall connecting it to a similar rock-face rising to cradle the city, flew our colors as well. The siege engines were not so numerous there, because there was merely a postern instead of a great gate piercing the stone wall. Still, rick, cot, and tree between the westron wall and the edge of the Alpeis in the distance were ablaze. Their owners might be inside the walls, but the damage would be immense, and the winter a lean one.
    A pall of smoke hung over the market district; I knew the wells were deep and the summer had not been dry, but a long, fiery siege would not help. Food would be the most acute concern, then disease.
    All the more reason to find Vianne and take her from this place, no matter what she thought of my trustworthiness.
    The attackers had not breached the city yet, but the siege engines—mangonels and the like—lobbed Graecan fire in high crimson-orange arcs. Sorcery sparked, rising from the walls in thin veils—Court sorcery and some leaf-green traceries of hedgewitchery, though most of the hedgewitches would be tending wounded and damping the fires inside the city.
    There
. On the walls over the main gate, a shifting globe of silvery witchlight, clearly visible even at this distance.
    Of course she would be there. In absolutely the most vulnerable place in the entire gods-be-damned city. It was my father’s place to be at the walls, but of
course
my
d’mselle
would not listen to reason.
    I almost,
almost
sent my