Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [115]
My doing, all my doing. But this was no worse than the rest. As the soldiers marched toward the capital, I followed.
Green archers appeared on the ramparts of the city. Then Lord Solek’s warriors, each man with gun. I could see them clearly in the soft summer air, looking like tiny toys carved for children.
“Flank right!” the captain of the advancing Blues called. A detachment of soldiers, shields raised, moved off to the right. They would attack from the east, I guessed. The main army marched forward.
Now I could hear the iron gates to the city being lowered, loud scrapings of metal on metal in the winches. How would this army get into Glory? Not even battering rams would budge those gates. And all the soldiers were doing was marching straight forward. The Blues were locked out and outnumbered, both. And here, unlike in the country of the Dead, they could not just fly through the air.
“Boots off!” the captain called.
Boots off? Each man propped his shield on the ground in front of him and kicked off his boots. The heavy boots, I could see now, had been left unlaced.
The main section of the army broke ranks and ran, following the small section that had deflected to the east. All at once I understood the captain’s plan. The east side of the city was where the laundry rooms and baths were located. These had been built out over the river, to let clean water flow in and out again, carrying soap and dirt downriver toward the sea. This was the first part of the palace I had ever seen, scrubbing myself clean after Kit Beale had brought me here. The attacking soldiers, who were from the palace and knew it as well as they knew their own bodies, would swim under the walls and take the palace from the inside. Solek had positioned his warriors and the queen’s Greens on the walls, for a more conventional attack. It would take them time to reach the laundry and the baths, with their myriad rooms for each rank of palace dweller, the laundries meanwhile defended only by the unarmed women who served there.
A cry of rage from the castle, and the Green archers let fly their arrows. The warriors fired their guns. And a silence fell, a silence of profound astonishment, of frightened disbelief. I stopped in the act of picking up a discarded boot, my body crouched, as silent as everyone else. We had all been struck dumb.
The arrows and the bullets from the guns had all passed through the bodies of the advancing Blues as if those bodies were so much air.
My mind raced. Had Cecilia—had I ever seen her fall, seen her injured, seen her so much as stub her toe on an inn table? No. I had not. I guarded her, hovered over her, kept her safe. Her body had been solid, yes, after I brought her back, but then it had been solid in the country of the Dead, too, as she lay unknowing in my arms. The bodies of the dead Blues had been solid, and of the dead warriors, and I had seen them fight with each other and the weapons pass right through them. But that had been on the other side! Here, the Blues were alive again. . . .
No. They were still dead. They were just dead here, in The Queendom of the living.
A great shout went up from the advancing army, part fear and part amazement. Then a din, a babble. I was too far behind to hear the words, but I could see the waving arms, the spreading grins. I did catch a word, then: witch. And half the men turned to where I stood.
Some actually knelt—in the middle of battle, with arrows and bullets passing through them! “The amulet and more,” I had said to the Blue captain. They thought this was the “more.” I had made them invincible.
Then the moment of silence, of obeisance in the midst of a lethal rain of weapons, was over. The Blues continued their dash toward the island. Some threw away their shields. Greens and warriors disappeared from the walls of the palace, presumably