Page 72 of Traitor Son

It felt likeminutespassed before a hand gripped her and sat her up.

Black eyebrows. Black eyes. A firm mouth, set in a disapproving line.

“Wake up,” rumbled the duke’s voice, and Ophele rubbed her face with trembling hands. The Bhumi night hags were very much clinging to her shoulders, even after he shook her. “Are you well?”

“I’m fine,” she whispered, at the dawning of another day.

* * *

“Twenty-foot sections and six-foot gaps,” said Remin, who was confronting a much less impressive wall on the north side of town. The palisade had already advanced eastward beyond the wheat fields to the edge of the old forest, and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the din of shouting and sawing and falling trees. “We’ll fill in the gaps later.”

“It’ll be a fortnight before there’s enough wall to be worth defending,” rumbled Jinmin, stumping along beside him. Having taken command of the night watch, the big man was deeply concerned about the progress of the palisade. “It’s still a long way to the east wall, m’lord.”

“It’ll be a fortnight before we’re trying to stop them here,” Remin replied, pausing by one six-foot stretch of wall, the raw timbers lashed together with wet rope. It would dry and shrink tight quickly in this heat. “Save the pines for pitch. We’re going to need a lot of torches.”

Ahead of them were hundreds of men busy at every stage of construction for these defenses, from clearing the land to deny the devils cover to dragging the trees in for processing. Sawyers, busily hewing them into planks. Rope-makers, pressed into service to soak long strips of bark and grasses in water and then weave them together. Pitch-makers, hauling away the pine branches as fast as they were trimmed, to be burned for their resin. Tounot was overseeing the construction of the palisade itself, the finished timbers thudding into the earth, braced with heavy stones to keep the devils from simply digging under it.

And other trees were reserved for barriers like the one lying at Remin’s feet: six feet wide, eight to ten feet tall, lashed together with two cross-braces on the back to make them strong.

“Break walls,” said Jinmin, eying them with foreboding.

“They’ll fill in the gaps in the palisade, when we’re ready,” said Remin, and confirmed Jinmin’s worst suspicions by bending to lift the nearest barrier, jerking his chin at the other man. “Get the other side.”

Normally such work was reserved for draft horses, but Remin and Jinmin made a reasonable substitute. It was a long walk to the cluster of cottages by the north gate, wattle-and-daub structures already obscured behind three lines of break walls. Every section was braced with two sturdy logs behind it and banked with earth at the base, designed to withstand even the deadly charge of a wolf demon, so that a single man with a sword could pin them between sections of wall. Behind the last line of walls were stands for archers, with baskets sitting ready for their arrows and sturdy braziers to give them light for shooting. The land had been cleared for twenty yards from the last line of break walls.

There were many lines of defenses. More soldiers guarded the nearest gaps in the palisade, funneling the devils into a gauntlet of archers. Each of Tresingale’s small camps had been built on a hilltop, with excellent visibility and no cover for the devils, so that even the sneaky stranglers could not approach unobserved. Devils did not fear torchlight, but they had sufficient animal intelligence that they would not attack an alert, wary target unless they outnumbered it.

Remin was still dissatisfied.

In this part of the valley, the devils usually didn’t arrive until late April, then escalated to a peak in late July and August. So far, his menhad been keeping pace with the beasts; they had only lost a single guardsman, and there was no doubt the early warning from Ferrede had saved lives. They kept the devils’ corpses out of sight to avoid alarming the camp, but Remin knew exactly how many there were.

He felt with deepest instinct that this was only the beginning.

He managed a few hours of hauling sections of wall before Juste appeared to protest the activity, galloping up as urgently as if he had been informed that the Duke of Andelin was running around the north gate with no clothes on.

“My lord,” he said pointedly, swinging off his evil-tempered roan, which immediately tried to bite him. “Please let me take your place. My horse could use some exercising.”

“Thanks, Juste,” Remin said agreeably, surrendering his section of wall. Jinmin was busy propping it up with two heavy braces. “I want this line finished by sunset. I’ll go look in on the barracks, if you’ll give Jinmin a hand.”

“Please let the bricklayers haul the bricks, Your Grace!” Juste called after him, correctly guessing what he was off to do. Remin waved a hand.

A few of his men had strong opinions about what work was appropriate for the hands of a nobleman, and Juste and Edemir in particular objected to Remin including himself among the town’s beasts of burden. But Remin thought it was good for his men to see him working. They could hardly complain about their own labors if they saw the Duke of Andelin trundling by with a load of bricks on his back, and it wasn’t as if he had any other useful skills. Remin was not a mason or a bricklayer or any sort of craftsman. He was a knight and a general, and he had spent his life learning to break walls, not build them.

There was plenty of work for his unskilled hands. He was pulled in a dozen different directions every day, and he genuinely loved all of it. One day he was helping mix clay for bricks, then juggling them as they came scorching out of a kiln. He took his turn felling trees, digging wells, digging trenches. There was no part of Tresingale that he had not touched, and he was learning right alongside the rest of his men how to mix mortar, how to build a foundation, how to plow and sow and one day, if it pleased the stars, to reap a bountiful harvest.

After supper, he donned his armor and took his place in the lines of soldiers, secretly glad of the excuse to get out of the cottage and awayfrom the princess. Soon, construction would begin on their house, and then they would hardly see each other at all.

And so, congratulating himself on how well he was managing everything, he walked in on her in the bath.

“Your Grace!” She squealed, ducking behind the lip of the cauldron, but it was already too late. The sight of her smooth white shoulders and bare breasts had already been seared onto his eyeballs.

“I’m sorry,” he said, electing to brazen it out rather than retreat like a coward. “I came to tell you, we’re looking at the manor site with Sousten tomorrow morning. He wants to show us his plans. Would you like to go?”

“The plans for the house?” she asked, peeping over the lip of the cauldron. He had never seen her in the bath before, and he was struck by how ridiculous it was; she looked as if she were about to be cooked into a soup.

His lips twitched until the back of his brain observed that she would make a very meager meal.

“Yes,” he said slowly, his eyes narrowing. Had she always been that thin? Surely her cheeks had been more rounded before, hadn’t they? Her eyes had always been splendid, thickly lashed and luminous, but now they looked almosttoobig in her small face.

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