After this terrible news from Brown-Horn, for days on end, anguish gripped my body like a lover would. The few words that I could gather from the mouths of the showmen and itinerants who continued to come to the siege camp confirmed what the carter had said. Bard the Young was dead and the city was in uproar. My city. I felt horribly helpless, but also very confused that it had affected me so much. It was a lingering feeling that I struggled with, the idea that I had suddenly been robbed of the peace that I had grown up in, and with it, the only thing left from my childhood. I didn't recognize the portrait that was described to me of Brown-Horn, except sometimes, when out of concern for objectivity I allowed myself to dive back into my memories. I could then make out the outlines of this ugly and terrible thing that I had fought in the shadows, without really understanding it, alongside Bert Sesh. To ward off this monster, Bard Govon and the first-blade had been ready to sacrifice me on the scaffold of the Cloister. Faced with the consequences of their failure, I could almost understand why.

It was a toothless peddler from Wolf-Bay who managed to tell me the most. He had passed through Woody's Tower a few weeks before Bard's death and had heard that the city had been in the grip of riots for several moons. There had been pitched battles in the streets of the lower town.

Several neighborhoods had been burned, including the Stream. The peddler had seen the smoke with his own eyes, from across the river. Part of the guard had rallied to the old families and, from their strongholds, they were fanning the flames of their supporters. The Horn-Brownians who had taken refuge in Cover-Pass claimed that the patriarchs, led by Lig Lemis, were paying bribes to join the ranks of the rioters. Some Fysses had been killed, the peddler had finally told me, but he knew little more. I had pressed him with questions, in a horribly careless way, about the farms outside the city, about the widow Ronna, or about the names of those from the clans who had died, but the man knew nothing more. My concern for Brindy and Ucar now included Dera, Frieze, and all those I had known at the Basin.

During the weeks that followed, while I let myself be consumed little by little by confusion and turmoil, I witnessed from afar the completion of the fortification works. A double network of trenches now encircled the camp, to the north and to the east. To access it from these directions, it was necessary to cross fifty spans of stakes and pits. The earth of the Pass was clear and compacted, and our works, which had resisted the rain, were now subject to the snow, which fell more and more often. The hundred or so diggers who were no longer needed by Carson were able to return to their farms, but the others, the poorest, the seasonal workers and the vagabonds with faces marked by hunger, had nowhere to go. Since most had come with their families, a majority decided to stay and help with maintenance or logistics. A proper village began to sprout to the west of the camp, populated by unlikely merchants, itinerant craftsmen, professional gamblers, and ruffians as unsavory as the soldiers they extorted.

On the ramparts, our enemies came and went, spying from the heights each new supply convoy, gauging our reserves and rationing theirs. The insulting contests continued unabated from the trench facing the towers. We knew the regulars by name now, and they knew ours. Miclo, Pettir the Perjurer, Aron, Old-Vovik, Young-Vovik, faceless voices, who sometimes left out the insults to discuss something else, the weather, the food, a village or another, a girl they had seen passing by.

I went there less and less often, because even though the chances of us ever fighting were reduced, it could still happen.

Those men up there, I didn't want to hurt them, and being around them kept reminding me of that. There was still the archer. Anonymous and invisible, Sven sometimes handed him a dented helmet mounted on the shaft of my spear, and he reminded us, day and night, almost two hundred spans away, why we feared him. Three weeks into the siege, a pot-boy more reckless or drunk than the rest had bet a penny that he could run the line in the open. He got shot before he had taken twenty steps and the infection had taken his leg. The archer's arrows all came from the shit bucket.

The Glas moon was slowly coming to an end and I was preparing to enter my thirteenth year. My body had already been changing for a long time, sculpted by the sword and Ulrick's lessons, but other changes were beginning to take place. I was growing, not much, but a slow progression had begun since the summer and sometimes made my knees ache, before I fell asleep. A fuzz on my crotch too, not much compared to the Vals of my age, but I had the blood of a Fyss and, among the clans, there were many adults less hairy than Sven.

The snowy ground of the Pass crunched under the boot, the idle militiamen were bored to death and Carson hid in his den, scribbling letters and reading reports. I discovered that the siege's boredom was the soldier's worst enemy, because he was faced with his own thoughts and, to escape, he had no choice but to waste his pay on gambling, drinking and women of ill repute. The Vals were the exception to the rule, and although their austere philosophy saved them from most vices, it didn't keep them from getting lazy.

Ofrid had become definitely angry with Carson, and when he was summoned to attend the councils, he came back with his jaw clenched.

If he dared to intervene to inform the legate of the vaïdoerk's opinion, he was punished with silence for the next few days, and Carson forced him to come and beg for news from him, like a dog coming to fetch a bone.

Our opinions or recommendations were of course summarily dismissed when they didn't validate decisions that had already been made. One of the major disagreements had taken place concerning the hundred or so Hillian prisoners who had languished in the abandoned barns of the Pass. Ofrid had proposed that they be sent back to the city, which would certainly not have pleased the foot soldiers, but which would have had the advantage of crowding the liege of Ac-Pass with a hundred more mouths to feed.

Carson had laughed out loud, before announcing his intention to ransom them to Hill. The prisoners had left one morning for the east, escorted by the cuirassiers in a ragged line. No one else ever saw the color of the gold that resulted from the exchange.

These disagreements in principle were annoying and humiliating, as was the fact that Carson seemed more interested in collecting war booty than in conquering Ac-Pass. But these difficulties were not the main problem, nor were they the main concern of the vaïdoerk. Comfortably settled into the relative comfort of the siege, most of the Waddans gradually forgot that we were still fighting a war. Soldiers spent far more time sitting on their bottoms playing dice than engaging in anything resembling martial exercise. Since the fortifications had been dug, the fear of a Hill winter counteroffensive was slowly but surely fading. While this prospect was indeed unlikely, it was not impossible either. The resentment that the Vals were feeling towards the legate crystallized around this point: at the price they were paid, the Vals could endure all the contempt in the world, but they could never stand that the indolence of another could tear their destiny out of their hands and deliver them to danger, as it had been the case on the road.

Without our hobblars, we knew we were blind, dependent on the observations provided by Carson's scouts. Most of them seemed capable at first glance, and spent a lot of time patrolling in the east, but their lack of interest in us, their systematic refusals when a vaïdogan or even a yunling offered to accompany them, did not allow us to know more. As the legate strictly controlled his men and the information to which we had access, Ofrid was forced into the perilous role of a tightrope walker. Our hettman was doing his best to keep the balance between silence and requests, while trying to objectively gauge the overall situation.

None of us had any illusions: as things stood, it would be impossible to see anything coming. It was a matter of hanging on, hoping that the pay would continue to fall so that we could continue to do nothing, that the city would surrender before spring and that Cleo Gon would not bother us all winter. That in the end, everything would be fine. As the days passed and we stood by, inactive and unwanted, more and more cataphracts hinted that, despite the gold, they didn't like this situation. One could not brag about being free and willingly put on someone else's blinkers.

By the time the Belmo celebrations arrived, Brown-Horn was still in my thoughts. Despite the state of siege, the Brownians were preparing to celebrate the occasion with as much gusto as they could afford. I, who usually welcomed such occasions, found myself in a very gloomy state of mind on the first day of the celebrations. Crouched down that evening near the central fireplace of the val pavilion, I kept brooding over one of Sesh's phrase that had come back to me. "No one wants a civil war, not them and not us," had been the exact words of the first-blade. I wondered what could have changed during my three years of absence, so that the brown-hornian citizens would fight in the street on the orders of the old families.

Initially, several members of the vaïdoerk had asked me about my depressed look, Sven first, and I had answered honestly.

Despite the sympathetic remarks and pats on the shoulder, I could tell they didn't understand. Not really. To them, if I was Ulrick Treikuss' yunling and fought within their troop, then I was Val. Since my attitude tended to prove otherwise, most of them left me alone. Even Sven and Ereck didn't come to joke with me anymore. That left Ulrick, whose face I could easily read as disapproving.

He watched me beg for news from Brown-Horn from each new peddler, and he warned me from the start. "You'll get hurt," he said. "But I won't stop you, as long as you remain careful." Since I had stayed pretty much cautious, he had kept his word. That didn't stop him from frowning every time he saw me, and that night was no exception. He had just returned from his daily walk on the east side of the line and fresh snowflakes adorned his graying hair. I turned my attention back to a log that was burning poorly, and as I fanned the fire, the old warrior came to sit beside me. His knee cracked, and I winced at the memory of the arrow I had removed from it. "You look constipated, Sletling," Ulrick grumbled as a preamble. He was wearing a sly half-smile that matched the occasion. "It's been a long time since you called me by that name, Ulrick Treikuss," I answered. "The last time was just before I killed a man in the wall."

The Val raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps," he said absentmindedly, a tone that was belied by his glistening eyes. "My mouth only repeated what my eyes saw. Here, in the wall... you ooze fear like a poorly molded turd." Irritation swelled in my chest. "Did you only come to talk to me about shit, Ulrick?" I muttered in a low voice. Several eyes turned towards us, in the darkness under the tent. "Yes," he said simply. "I'm tired of you wandering around and whining like a rheumatic old woman." I flushed as I murmured, but Ulrick cut me off sharply. "Your old life's not coming back, Fyss," he declared as gently as he could.

"Jask and Ringer are waiting for you outside. Go drink with them tonight, and mourn. If you had stayed in Brown-Horn, you would have been hanged. And it wouldn't have made much difference to what's happening there now, believe me." I opened my mouth again, but it was useless. The Val growled. "Iss Auffe. This is an order I give you, yunling, not a request."

My irritation flirted closely with anger for the first time in a long time. Then a hand came to rest on my shoulder, and my surprised gaze found Ofrid. A slight smile distorted his sharp face. He waved a small purse in front of my eyes. "This is the first time I've ever seen a man have to insist that another man drink at his own expense," he said. He shook his braid, and the polished wooden logs clinked on the bronze scales. "But Ulrick is right, and you should listen to him, yunling." The great hettman insisted on the last word. "You have been dissipated for almost a moon. You almost broke Folli's hand in training the day before yesterday. It's time for that to stop. Go celebrate the belmo with the Brownians. Get drunk, and move on." My gaze wavered for a while between the two warriors, then the anger suddenly subsided. Out of spite, I finally gave in. I grabbed the coins and, without a word, left the pavilion towards the festivities outside.