“Dimitriy, with me!”

  At first, it was the ripples from the long wagon being pulled across the bridge, piled high with bags that the soldiers had filled with sand from the lake shore, that distorted Aurie’s reflection in the well. The oxen that grunted behind her were just another piece of the noise surrounding her, blending with the chimes and whistles of metal striking metal. Bowstrings were pulled taut to send arrows striking the boards of a shield. Noise blanketed around her in a mixture of colors, shadows, men, soldiers, animals, flowing around her in those ripples.

  She couldn’t remember why she had come to the well. She couldn’t remember how she got there. Or why. She heard them talking, but there were no words. She heard the bags being hefted from the wagon, laughter, but she saw shadows in her reflection. But it wasn’t her reflection in the well whose ripples were slowly fading into a flat mirror image. It was someone else looking up at her. Someone with stitches cresting ridges that connected bulging brows to cheeks that were hidden beneath purplish mounds of flesh. Someone with a lower lip that hung like raw meat from her teeth. Eyes that had become hooded as they stared, empty and pale through tiny passages between black puffs that collided with a bloated ridge to a nose that had been broken and reset.

  The first one was with an arrow. The Holy Spirit's voice had turned her. It thundered through her veins with every breath from the moment she saw Vigora lying on the road. ‘Loose, now.’ Calm as a resting grandfather and thunderous as a rainstorm. ‘Left, loose…Draw thy blade…Right…Left…’

  Aurie’s hands were still shaking. The ride back, she didn’t think about it. Lying on the cot, she didn’t think about it. She only wanted to explain. She wanted to tell Enya that there was an army coming. She wanted to make sure Draka was safe. That Nina was alive. And now…now she rested a hand on the hilt of the sword belted on her hip, through loops of soldier’s trousers, tucked into soldier’s boots, with a soldier’s shirt to replace the clothes Maud had cut through to stitch her wounds. Soldier.

  The Holy Spirit in her head, a man's screams in her ear, and his blood sprayed on her face. Her first kill. Blood that tasted like hers does now. No different, though somehow it was sweeter in that moment because it wasn’t hers.

  “They’re coming from the flanks!”

  “More from the road!”

  “LEFT…RIGHT…RIGHT…BEHIND…LEAP! ROLL!”

  “Nina!”

  “Aurie!”

  “I’m alright!”

  “There’s more!”

  “You’re safe now.”

  Aurie felt the strikes as if they were happening again. It wasn’t like when the village attacked her and Balor. It wasn’t like Balian. These men were trying to kill her. They shot arrows at her, threw spears, swung axes, swords, even crushed her into the tree so that she fell backwards over top of Draka and Adrian. That was when the rock was used to smash her face. He had been on top of her. The voice crashed through her, “Light, now!”

  Draka’s golden hazel eyes looked down into hers one last time with that gaping expression, like he was studying her, moving them from her eyes to her lips, while they danced. Not the way he looked up at her when he saw that she was who came to his rescue. Not the open-mouthed stillness that reminded her of the way Balor looked when he was brought to the table along with half of her son.

  Maud was growling when she cut into him. Each piece of wood and metal she pulled from him was slammed louder and louder into that bowl, one after another. After she was done, the Paladins healed him. The Clerics constantly healed him while she was working on him.

  They said he will wake up in a day or two, that God allowed him to be healed anew. But Aurie wondered, after all this, would he? Would he be healed? Alone again in his silence, unable to say to anyone how afraid or lost he felt, how angry, or even want comfort because there was no one he could go to for it that wouldn’t cause an uproar of some kind. Maud, perhaps, but she was fuming, a crimson wolf baring teeth as if the meat she was digging her hands into to retrieve whatever her prodding had found was her meal instead. And Aurie knew what she had seen when she found them. Draka had shielded Adrian with his body, healed him as he was being rained on by arrows, ready to die so he could live. If he had just brought guards with him instead of sneaking out in the early morning…

  Why was she at the well? She left the Hall. Was she done getting worked on? Didn’t she still need healing?

  The Paladins with Draka’s cross on their armor, but different stars—less points on them—came in while Maud was still working on Nina. They went to Aurie first. A nudged shoulder, half-cocked smiles, encouraging winks, and one gave Aurie a pat on her shoulder, “They’re just flesh wounds.” And that was all. That was it.

  They went to Olaf and began telling jokes while they waited for Maud to call for one of them when Nina began convulsing wildly. The sight of Maud shifting organs to put the one she had in her hand where it belonged once Nina was braced by the men, would never fade from Aurie’s memory. The way her daughter wiped the sweat from her brow by smearing blood off her wrist after, between blank stares and hard glares, would forever be engrained. Along with the moment that Maud set the bowl on Aurie’s lap, overflowing with the arrowheads—some with lengths of the wooden shaft still there and splintered—and other bits of metal, rock, and debris, that she had cut into Adrian and Draka to dig out. Not a word. Just a bowl, a brief glare, and Maud went to the basin of water that had become as thick and red as the blood she was trying to wash from her hands.

  “But I didn’t know,” Aurie had tried to say. She wanted to say. She couldn’t say it enough. But Maud wasn’t listening. She would talk over her as if she wasn’t there, calling for tools, for cloths, for vodka—sometimes for her to wash things, other times for her to drink. There were commands to soldiers, preparations in there, too. But Maud looked through her, talked through her, moved around her as if she were nothing but the cot she was laying in, even as she and Senna stitched her wounds.

  Only her brow needed stitches from the swelling, but her leg, her back, her side, a foot, somewhere around the square of her back along the spine…and then they had to reset her broken nose and jaw, realign her hip, and apparently a rib. The Clerics took care of the bones. They still hurt, an aching reminder that even with the Holy Spirit in your ear, guiding you and commanding you, the pain will be felt, you will take the blows, you will still be wounded. And, if the Lord wills it, you will die.

  Aurie reached her hand out toward the reflection of her face. The icy water touched her fingertips, casting ripples that distorted her monstrous reflection. God didn’t will it, today. His Will was for them to live. For Draka to live. For Adrian to live. She was thankful for that. More thankful for that than anything she could ever be thankful for in that moment. She remembered each moment, flowing through her as if it were a mezzanine of noise being wrapped and tied around her senses. Each blow, each kill, each step she had to fight for to get to him, each fighting step to get him to her horse, each moment that was paid in blood to the cacophony of the Holy Spirit commanding her, wielding her as a weapon, a tool, and her following each command with unquestioning devotion. And here she was, because of that, touching cold well water in the safety of the bailey, because she followed every command at the exact moment it was given. Because, she knew now more than ever before, she is a weapon, she is a tool. God’s weapon, God’s tool, and was created with no other greater purpose.

  Put simply, a soldier.

  Like her father. Like her grandfather. Like her great-grandfather. She had pushed Leta into all the places of the market where she knew soldiers didn’t go when they were selling flowers, looking for their husbands. She had found them farmers for husbands. She had seen what happens to soldiers. What happens when they are no longer weapons, no longer tools for their lords. Her father must be smiling in the hole that her mother rolled him into. A soldier who took an injury to the leg. A soldier who could find no work when he no longer could soldier, with a wife and four children. A soldier who couldn’t keep a roof over his family’s heads. A soldier with a wife and two children in an alley with his last pence spent on a tankard of ale to soothe the cough that clogged his last breath in the dead of winter so he didn't mourn the other two children a moment longer.

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  She married a farmer to escape that life, that fate. The fate of her mother, selling her body to provide them shelter, though it was never enough regardless. She was raising a farmer so he would never be a soldier. And they…she…Her eyes fell to the sword on her hip. She was the soldier. And she’s falling in love with a soldier. She just fought to rescue that soldier. That soldier who was now known as her daughter’s father…not the farmer. There was a soreness in her brow with that realization.

  No one was coming to her about anything. The castle was moving and Aurie was still. Still as a statue in the middle of a flowing river.

  She now saw them. Knights in thicker armor than she had seen any knights wear, nearly as thick as Draka’s, hefting bags filled with sand to be piled along the outside of the walls. Knights assembling bows that launch spears thick as horses on the walls. Knights with Draka’s cross and stars with as many points as Enya. Some with one more point than her. Knights, not Clerics, not Paladins, but mere knights like Gerard who took up the cross and went to the Holy Lands to join the Order of the Holy Sepulcher. These were their regulars with more experience than Enya’s entire Order.

  It was her daughter they went to. When they spoke of her, many with smiles noting her beauty, they called her Queen Maudeline. Maud was the Queen Regent until Draka awoke. Aurie had become…the Queen’s mother.

  Another glance at the sword on her hip and she wondered. The Paladins who had come in had given her this sword. It had the mark of their Order. She was marked as theirs now. But nothing else. Just a soldier who was yet to be told what to do, where to go, what place to bleed on. Unlike her ancestors, though, the army she belonged to was God’s. And her daughter’s. A farmer’s wife, farmer’s mother, no longer. Regent, no more. Paladin, soldier, Queen’s mother. In that order.

  Gerard came riding around the wagon. He quickly slid from the saddle with a fist to his chest in salute to the Cleric who was standing on the wagon, directing those who were offloading the bags of dirt and sand. Aurie mustered a smile and put a fist to her heart in a similar salute, though it was less enthusiastic.

  Gerard came within a few paces of her and gaped, eyeing her from head to toe and back up. His weathered handsome face sank along with his shoulders at the sight of her, his feet carrying slowly toward her. “God bless that you’re alive. When I saw Dimitriy and Gavriil, I didn’t believe it.”

  “They’re back? Are they—?”

  Gerard grabbed both of her shoulders, his smile full of sympathy. “Asmir was gravely wounded. He’s being tended to at the Greshon camp. But you…what were you thinking, jumping into an ambush like that? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I wasn’t going to…” Aurie felt that ache in her brows again, only this time it was coupled by the sting of tears bringing salt to the splits in between the swells of her eyelids. “I can’t go through this again, Gerard. I can’t lose him. I had to…Is Dimitriy—Gavriil? Are they—?”

  “They’re about as butchered as you are, but they’re fine. Dimitriy will be here, soon. He’s Oathed to Draka, so his place is at Draka’s side, just like Olaf.”

  “Good,” Aurie tried to stiffen her back and lift her chin like Alice always does. But she didn’t have the strength to. She looked up into his face, into the shimmers of the torches in his brown eyes, and shook her head, “I healed him, but I didn’t know I was supposed to pull the arrows out first. There were so many. I killed…I fought. I healed him, but not the right way. I need to do it the right way. When they come, I’ll do it right. I thought I did it right. God agreed when I healed him. That means I did it right, doesn’t it? But now…and where did they come from? When does it stop? Draka, if he didn’t…if we didn’t…”

  “Aurie,” Gerard pulled her to him, wrapping his arms around her so tightly that she felt curled against him. And she let herself fold into his embrace, let her breathing steady, let the tears fall, let herself calm, as he said into her hair, his breath drumming each syllable on the tip of her ear, “You did what you were supposed to. You survived. You kept him alive and got him back. You were nowhere near ready for that kind of fight and you made it out alive. It’s a bloody miracle you made it out of there alive.”

  Aurie held onto him. She let her eyes shut for just a moment as she said, “I miss when nothing like this was possible. When it was just pinning shoes and shining leather.”

  “Me, too, Aurie,” Gerard said, tightening his embrace.

  Aurie opened her eyes to say with a heaviness with her ear pressed into his chest, “Gathering herbs and helping Balor with the tilling.”

  Gerard’s arms slid down from her back and she felt his chest inflate as they both took a step back from each other. Aurie swallowed as she pinned her hair behind her ear, refusing to look up and see that pained look she knew was on his face.

  “I deserve that,” Gerard nodded, biting his lip. “I should’ve asked you to marry me, Aurie. I should’ve been a better man and I’ve been…”

  “Let it go, Gerard,” Aurie shook her head at him. “You didn’t love me. You know that better than anyone.” He pursed his brow in protest, but she didn’t give him a chance to say a word. “If you did, you wouldn’t have gone on that pole. So, let it go.”

  “I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to forgive myself for what I did to you, for not marrying you. And I’ve been with no other. I thought…”

  “Don’t,” Aurie chuckled a little, turning away. “You need to forgive yourself, Gerard. I forgave you a long time ago. Because of you, I met my Balor and had Maud and Alden and had a wonderful life. At least,” she shrugged on the verge of tears, “mostly, until recently, it was wonderful. But also, because of you, in an odd sort of way, I met Draka, too. And he’s taken care of my little girl when she needed him the most. And now, she’s the Regent. The Queen. And I…” She hesitated, the words forming on her tongue, but she held them back.

  Gerard already knew what those words were with how he thinned his lips and scratched at his beard. He nodded, “I figured as much. He’s a good man. A bit on the rough side and one hell of a temper, but a good man through to his core. Something I don’t think anyone would ever say about me. He’s a good match, Aurie. I’m happy for you. Truly. And, thank you for setting me straight on that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Aurie winced. “We all make mistakes. And you’re a good man, Gerard. Obviously,” she indicated his tabard with the sigil of the Holy Sepulcher with a wave.

  Gerard only let out a long sigh. She was almost certain she heard him say under his breath, “I’m not.” But she couldn’t be sure. He said with a warm grin, “Dimitriy didn’t know your name or Nina’s, so he gave you two battle names. He called Nina the Red Wolf. I told him she’s known as the Red Spider in Strasbourg and he said that she’s too vicious in battle to be a spider.”

  Aurie chuckled at that. “And what was his name for me?”

  Gerard flicked his brows and widened his smile. “Well, he’s not the only one. Gavriil seconds it, so if Asmir wakes and gives third witness, in the Holy Sepulcher, it becomes your battle name.”

  “Like Draka the Rosethorn?”

  “Rosethorn?” Gerard let out a loud howl, “He’s not called that! Draka’s battle name is Lightbringer. That’s why his surname is now Luminis. Where’d you get Rosethorn from?”

  “Oh,” Aurie shrugged it off. “It must be a mistake then. I don’t remember. But what is mine?”

  Gerard eyed her for a moment with a drawn out, “Uh-huh.” Then, with a brow raised, he answered, “They said you rode in with no armor and—I quote—blossomed over Draka, covered in the blood of your enemies, to protect him like a rose spinning its petals, with a sword in one hand and a bow in the other. So, you’re now Paladin Aurelie the Rose in Frost. Or, Aurelie the Rose, for short.”

  Aurie blinked for a moment at that. “Rose in Frost?”

  “If a Uralic tacks something related to the cold onto you, it means something,” Gerard laughed. “He’s saying you’re cold as ice to your enemies, unyielding and formidable. Without armor, he said, you felled more than ten knights. Your name will be added to our rolls, once this reaches Paladin Qasim’s ear. And it will, the moment Dimitriy gets here. For now, though…”

  Aurie searched the many faces milling around her. Paladim Qasim. Who is that? Has she already met him? Was he one of the Paladins that came in the Hall?

  “You need to rest. You’re convalescent for at least until sunrise or the battle begins,” Gerard said with a heaviness. “That’s why no one has given you orders. That’s why you’re being left alone.”

  “I don’t think I can sleep even if I wanted to.”

  “You should at least try,” Gerard grinned at her. “You’re no good to us if you’re sleep deprived. I have to go report to my commanding Cleric.” He put a comforting hand on her shoulder, “Rest, Aurie. You need all the energy you can get before they come. Trust me. You faced the vanguard. Their bulk is a lot more disciplined and better equipped.”

  “How will we beat them?” Aurie shook at him. “If that’s true. I mean, if it is God’s Will, but really, how?”

  Gerard’s grin widened. “By not letting them win, of course.” He guffawed and made his way to the stairs going up the wall, leaving Aurie staring after him with a dumfounded glare.

  “You don’t say?” She shouted after him. “That’s like saying the reason the door is open is because it isn’t closed!” Through gritted teeth, mostly to herself, “Still plowing useless at explaining things.”

  “We’re going to fight, Paladin,” the Cleric on the wagon called, his shirt sleeves rolled up over his bulging arms despite the cold. There were howls of agreement from the men and women who the others on the wagon with him were offloading the bags to. “Until we can’t.”

  That made Aurie nod. Not exactly helpful, either.

  The Cleric smiled, revealing teeth that glistened with firelight, “And then we’ll fight some more.”