“Is it worth trying to strike a bargain?” Jemiu asked.
“With Half-Ax?”
“With Koli.” Jemiu looked from face to face. “He may want to venge himself on the Ramparts – and I know I speak as one now – but he doesn’t hate Mythen Rood. He doesn’t hate his home. If he knows what we’re facing, he may agree to help us.”
“And hang me and Catrin on the gather-ground,” Fer said tightly. “And vaunt himself over us like a king. I’d rather die fighting.”
Catrin scowled. “It’s not just our deaths that’s in the weighing pan here. Jemiu, what Jon saw was an army. An army with engines of war we never seen before. Things like Challenger, only bigger and worse. Does that speak of a private venging or does it speak of something bigger?”
Jemiu shook her head. “I wish I could tell,” she said in a cracked voice. “You all know my son, what he was like. He never had no harm in him. Too much softness was his problem. I can’t believe he’d give himself to the spilling of anyone’s blood, let alone ours.”
“Your son killed my son,” Fer said. “Mardew died alone, far from home, and Koli didn’t even stay to bury him.”
“Koli’s got reason to hate us,” Catrin said heavily. Fer made to speak again, but she was not given space to. “He’s got reason to feel he was treated badly, and to want to give answer for it. How far that answer might go, we got no way of guessing. When you’ve put a red tally together – or an army, as the Half-Ax word is – and you’ve once set it moving, you’re not in all ways able to say what it will do and what it won’t do. Things take their course. People in a fight of that kind do what comes into their heads to do, and afterwards they’re mazed to see they did it. Whatever Koli might want, or not want, we can’t trust to his mildness to stand between us and ruin.”
She slumped back in her chair, her eyes like bruises in her pale face. I doubt she’d seen a bed since before Rampart Knife came home. “I think we got a choice left to us. One choice. Try as I might, I don’t see more than that.”
“We got to run away,” I said.
Catrin nodded. “That’s what I was thinking, yes. We’re in a trap, and if we mean to live we’ve got to slip out of it.”
“But…” Jon looked from his mother to me and back again with wilderment and dismay in his face. “We can’t. We got nothing if we leave Mythen Rood. Even if we could get through the Half-Ax lines, we’d be…” He reached for a word and didn’t find one.
“We’d be helpless,” Fer said. “Like animals. Prey to every bird and beast and tree that got a sniff of us. All you said before, Cat, about the fence being our best protection, did you forget it now? We’re dead if we open those gates.”
“What I said before doesn’t stop being true, Fer. But the one thing we got over Berrobis is that she’s got five hundred to move, with all their stores and baggage. We can hope to run faster than they can follow.”
“She doesn’t have to move her five hundred though,” Jemiu said. “She can task some to follow – the quickest she’s got, or with tech that can track us like Challenger is tracking them. And where would we run to? Where is there a haven that will take us?”
In following that thought, I ran headfirst into a different one. Jemiu was right: there was no haven. We were stuck between the grate and the griddle, with enemies every way we turned. I thought of what Challenger had told me that one time about emergent events.
Out of the chaos, patterns will appear and coalesce. Out of a million tiny, passing things, some will not pass but will stay and become pivotal. Other things will hinge on them, and bend their courses.
Koli Woodsmith was surely an emergent event. And probably one that Half-Ax didn’t know about yet.
“I’ll fight before I run, Cat,” Fer was saying. “Running sits ill with me. If Half-Ax is going to swallow us, let’s stick in their throats as much as we can.”
“I got an idea,” I said. “I think I do.”
Fer shot me a glare. “I was talking to my sister.”
Catrin gave her back that sharpness, and more besides. “You’re talking to all of us. I got no more voice at this table than the rest of you do. Sweet fuck, Fer, it’s gone past the point where Vennastins get to tell the sun what face to wear. We’re all together in this now.” She turned to me. “What’s your thought, Spinner?”
“My thought’s this. We shouldn’t trouble ourselves to look for a haven, because we’re not like to find one. We break through the Half-Ax circle, but we pick a time when it’s easy for them to follow. Not night. Maybe not full day either. Just before sun-up, say.”
Jon shook his head. “Yeah, but then they’ll come right after us.”
“That they will.”
“And kill us as we run,” said Jemiu. “Starting with the slowest. The children. The old.”
“The children and the old won’t be with us.” I carried on over their startled looks. “There are rooms behind the Count and Seal. Hidden rooms. Catrin will bear me out. Any that don’t come with us will wait there.”
“For what?” Fer demanded. “For Dandrake to come down and blow the last horn?”
“For our return. My plan is that we don’t go far, or stay away for long. We break out like I said – a big tally, with all our best fighters and enough besides so it looks like it’s all of us. Berrobis will give chase. She’s bound to. If nothing else, she believes she’s got business still in hand with Rampart Fire. A sword and a sheath was in it.”
“Where would we go, Spin?” Jon asked.
“Why, we’d go west, the same way Rampart Knife went.” I covered his hand with mine. “Jon, there’s a steep slope that leads down to the river there, you said?”
“Yeah, there is. It’s not always straight west, but it mostly tends that way.”
“That should give us some cover from arrows and bolts. And we won’t let them get close enough to task us with swords and spears.”
“And what’s at the end of this run?” Catrin asked.
“Koli Woodsmith is at the end of it. But we know that and Berrobis doesn’t. Her people will run right up against his.”
“With us in the middle.”
“With us getting out of the way of it as quick as we can. If Koli sees the Peacemaker’s army in grey and red all bearing down on him, he’s not going to care about a few people that are stepping off to the side. He’s going to push back hard against the bigger threat. And then the grate and the griddle can sort it out between them which is hottest.”
They were struck different ways by the idea. I thought Fer would be the hardest to convince, but I was wrong. There was an anger that was strong in her, and my plan spoke loud to that anger. She would dearly have loved to tear the Half-Ax ranks in pieces her own self. To see them torn by others was the nearest thing.
Catrin and Jemiu worried the plan this way and that, but they didn’t throw it out of gates all at once. They were just looking at all the many holes that were in it, and thinking how they could be stopped up.