Neel turned to Tomik, who was still seething. “Do you have the Marvel?”

Tomik pulled the smoky sphere from his pocket.

“Then tell Zora to get into the Tank and steer it toward the Zim Bridge. You and Lucas get into position. Treb’s already moved the Roma into the hills. I’m going to join them now.” He nodded at his black mare, which stamped outside the castle gates, and at the chestnut horse beside her. “Ready, Iris?”

“Just make sure I’m off that horse when I get good and angry and acidic,” she said. “I’d rather not kill it. It’s a nice color.”

“Astro?” Neel said hesitantly. No one had really discussed what role the spider would play in the battle. “Maybe you should stay here, in the castle.”

The legs dropped away from Astrophil’s face. He had stopped shaking, and his green tears were wiped away. “Treb said I was fighting with him,” said the spider. “So that means that I should go with you and Iris into the hills.”

“All right,” said Neel, and was heartened to know that a piece of Petra would stay with him. He lifted his palm. Astrophil jumped onto it, and the cold prickle of his legs against Neel’s skin felt almost like hope. Neel tried not to think of the silence that had filled his mind since Petra’s last message.

“Here.” Tomik shoved a bag at him. He looked calmer, but the stony quality of his face told Neel that he was not forgiven. Neel understood. He couldn’t forgive himself. “What’s this?” he asked.

“More Marvels. As many as I could make in one night, and as deadly as I could make them.”

“Thanks, Tom. I’ll spread them out among the army. Now, Dee.” Neel turned to him. “You—”

“There is no role for me in this battle,” said Dee. “I am leaving now with Madinia and Margaret, through a Loophole.”

Neel shrugged. He shouldn’t have expected anything different. Dee was too canny to risk himself, or anything he cared about. Neel had known this all along.

“Good luck,” said Dee, and walked back into the castle to tell his daughters it was time to leave.

* * *

A FEW HOURS LATER, when the rising sun had split the sky into bands of color, Treb peered through the spyglass Tomik had modified long ago. He swore.

“What?” Astrophil bounced on his shoulder. “What is it? Let me see.”

Neel, who had seen if not heard his general’s unhappiness over the noise of thousands of horses and soldiers, sidled his black mare near. He snatched the long tube out of Treb’s hands. He looked through it, and almost wished Tomik hadn’t been able to magnify the lens’s power so well. Neel didn’t like what he saw marching along the road on the other side of the river, heading to the Zim Bridge. “Rodolfo has changed the order of his army,” he said grimly.

“He’s bulked up the head of the line,” Treb explained to Astrophil. “Yesterday, Rodolfo and his Gray Men were sitting pretty behind a bit of the cavalry, right up front. Now he and his monsters are farther back, better protected behind a thicker wall of horses and infantry. This means we’ve got to bite off more of his army to give Tomik and his Marvel a chance.”

“Oh.” Astrophil sagged.

“Don’t you worry, spider. As long as that Marvel works, and Lucas blows up that bridge, we’ll be all right.”

Neel hadn’t spent much time around royalty, and didn’t know what a king should do in a situation like this. He decided calling his general a liar wasn’t it. He collapsed the spyglass so that each segmented tube slid inside another. He jammed the thing into Treb’s hands and rode off to tell Shandor to get his horses in line, and to take Tomik with him.

45

A Proposal

PETRA GRIPPED THE BARS of her cage and scanned the gray waves of monsters surging around her. She couldn’t find her father. She didn’t even know for certain that he was here. The Gristleki looked alike, loping on all fours as they poured down the road toward the Zim Bridge. Their scaly skulls were identical in the rising sun. She was too far away to see their eyes.

She shifted her gaze to the front of the army. The first line of horses had just crossed the bridge. She reached for the little stitch that linked her mind to Neel’s, but it was gone. It had burned up like straw in a fire. She remembered his last words to her, his promise to hate her. Again, Petra felt hollow.

The sea of Gristleki parted with a screech. Rodolfo, who had been riding ahead of Petra’s cage, guided his horse toward her. The Gristleki fell back from the horse, but howled longingly at it. The stallion threw its head nervously. Rodolfo yanked on the bit and pulled his horse alongside the cage.

“I have been thinking,” he told Petra in a merry tone.

She closed her eyes. She thought she knew what he would say, though not because her magic had returned. She would never gain that back. But she remembered what she had seen in the tent. She remembered his plans for her. Perhaps, though, he had changed his mind.

He hadn’t. “You should marry me,” he said.

It still shocked her. “I can’t marry you. I’m only fourteen.”

“Which means that you are of age. You are an adult. In the Hapsburg Empire, you have the legal right to marry.”

“You’re too old.” The words blurted out of her mouth before she could remind herself that people in cages have no luxury to be rude.

“Twenty years old is a fine age for a husband. What is six years between us? They only mean that I am wiser, with more experience, and can better guide you in life.”

“I don’t understand,” Petra said. She decided that people in cages have a very dim future, and should be honest while they can. “Why would you want to marry me? You hate me.”

“Yes, but the people love you.” He leaned on his horse, looking up at her. “And if they think you love me, then they will love me, too. It will be like a fairy tale. In fairy tales, a prince always marries some unworthy peasant girl. Of course, in the stories, the girl is beautiful. But I am willing to overlook your shortcomings. Who knows? Maybe you will look better in a few years.”

Petra kept her eyes trained on the front of the army. The cavalry had passed over the bridge.

“It does happen,” the prince said encouragingly. When he received no response, he said, “Your choice is simple. Either you will marry me, or you will be executed at my coronation. As a traitor to the crown, you can expect a painful death. Well? What is your answer?”

She looked down at him. “No.”

“Death, then,” he said cheerfully, and rode away.

* * *

ZORA STEERED THE TANK under the river until its lights caught the pillars of the Zim Bridge. She pressed a button that brought it to a halt. It hovered below the water’s surface, humming quietly. She pulled a tube out of the wall and pressed a button that would send the other half of the tube out of the Tank’s hull, snake it through the water, and pop it through the surface. Zora peered through her end of the tube. She studied what was marching over the bridge and cursed. Treb would have been impressed to hear that an aristocratic lady knew as many swear words in her language as he did in his.

She sat back in the pink chair and considered what she had seen. Rodolfo had changed the order of his army. This would make things more difficult for the Roma forces, but what should Zora do about it? When should she give Lucas the signal he needed to blow up the bridge?

Zora had a good mind for strategy. She wouldn’t have done well in the thick of a battle, seeing blood and bodies all around her, but there are different kinds of strengths. Some people might have panicked alone in a ship underwater, cut off from any communication with their friends. Zora, however, calmly listened to the engine’s heartbeat, and realized that pure numbers weren’t so important. It made sense to cut an army in half, but Rodolfo’s was no ordinary army. The Gray Men surrounding him were worth several soldiers, and given the fact that Rodolfo had moved more of his army in front of him, maybe a blown-up bridge shouldn’t split the army exactly in half. Lucas should do it right after Rodolfo and the Gray Men had crossed to the other side. That would give the Roma slightly more than half of Rodolfo’s total forces to deal with at first, which wouldn’t make things easy. But the most important thing was to eliminate the threat of the Gristleki, every last one.

She peered through the tube again, and turned it so that the view focused on Lucas. He was a small figure dressed in brown to match the dirt, huddling under the end of the bridge on the Roma’s side of the river. He was waiting for her signal.

Zora turned the tube’s view back to Rodolfo’s army, and squinted when she saw a cage being dragged across the bridge, surrounded on all sides by a rippling gray flood of monsters. She looked harder and gasped. Petra was in that cage. Relief and worry warred within Zora. Iris had told her what Petra had done, and now Petra was clearly in a desperate situation. Yet she was alive.

Zora wished she could tell her friends what she had seen. But, well, she couldn’t. She could only do what she was there to do. She focused, and when Petra and Rodolfo and his monsters had crossed the bridge, Zora brought the Tank to the surface.

* * *

PETRA EXHALED when she saw Rodolfo cross the bridge into the valley. Gray Men flowed after him, and the horses hauled her cart off the stone bridge and onto the dirt road. Bare brown hills rose steeply on either side of her. There were few trees, and they stood na**d, waiting for spring to truly show itself.

Petra was in the valley. There was no wind. Soon, she told herself. Lucas would blow up the bridge soon. She kept herself perfectly still. She could not look behind her. She could not alert Rodolfo or anyone else to what was about to happen.

But then she heard it: shouts of surprise from the foot soldiers following the last lines of Gristleki that traveled behind her. Petra decided it wouldn’t seem strange if she turned to look now, so she did. Archers ranged along the bridge, shooting arrows into the water below.

“What is going on?” shouted Rodolfo, who swung his horse around and passed Petra’s cage, heading back toward the bridge. “Why are you firing without my command?” The Gray Men turned their heads and followed their master, flowing toward the Zim Bridge.

“No,” Petra whispered. Her father might be among those lines of Gristleki ready to creep back onto the bridge they had just crossed. He could not step onto that bridge. In minutes, it would be gone in an explosion of gunpowder and flame. She stared at the slithering Gristleki. What could she do to make them stop?

Petra ran her hands over the cage, searching for something, anything that could help her. She found a rough edge of metal. She looked at it, then at the Gristleki. She set her bare arm against the edge and began to saw at her skin.

* * *

AS ARROWS thunked harmlessly against the hull of the Tank, Zora saw Lucas dart from his hiding place. He crawled along the dirt under the foot of the bridge to the barrel of gunpowder he had wedged there during the night. She saw small sacks of gunpowder stretching in a line along the arc of the bridge, below the sight of the soldiers—unless they happened to peer down at the bridge, and not at the Tank below.

Zora fired one of the Tank’s metal spears. It soared up through the air and over the bridge to bury itself in a man.

A small flame burst below Lucas’s swift hands. He turned, ran, and jumped into the water below. Soldiers trained their arrows on him and fired as he swam toward the Tank.

The fuse Lucas had lit sputtered and seemed to go out. Then it flared again, and burned its way toward the gunpowder.

* * *

BLOOD STREAMED from Petra’s arm and dripped to the ground below. A Gray Man crawling toward the bridge whipped his head around toward Petra. Then another did the same, and another.

With an inhuman howl, the entire pack of Gristleki launched itself at Petra’s cage.

They battered it, shaking it, snaking bony arms through the bars. Petra recoiled to the center of the cage, gripping her bleeding arm. Her breath shuddered, and she couldn’t help a cry of fear when a Gray Man, frustrated by the smell of blood it couldn’t reach, leaped on the neck of one of the horses pulling her cage. The Gray Man rubbed its scaled skin against the horse, which squealed and reared, slamming into the other horse. The cage tilted, and threatened to topple to the ground.

“Stop!” Rodolfo’s horse was surging through the monsters, pushing to reach Petra’s cage. Rodolfo pulled out a whip and brought it down on a Gray Man’s back. “You can eat her in front of the Hapsburg court, not now! Has everyone gone completely mad?”

There was a crackling sound, and the bridge exploded behind him.

46

The Battle Begins

ASTROPHIL FLINCHED AT THE SOUND of the explosion in the valley below, then clung harder to Treb’s shoulder.

“Now,” Neel told Treb, and wheeled his black horse to take the center of the front line, alongside Iris.

“But,” Treb said in a low voice only Astrophil could hear, “he’s supposed to say something to our soldiers. Something to rouse their ire. Neel’s supposed to make a speech.”

“It seems that he does not want to,” said Astrophil. “Perhaps you should do it. You are the general.”

“Neel … he’s good with words. But me…”

“You do not have to sound noble,” said Astrophil. “Be fierce. Be mean. You can do that.”

“Yes,” said Treb. “That I can.” He turned his horse to face the Roma cavalry and the foot soldiers behind them, and began to speak.

Astrophil didn’t listen. He was too nervous. He glanced at the two sides of the valley—at theirs, the southern side, which was steep but not too treacherous for the Roma horses, and at the northern side, where Tomik, Shandor, and a small portion of the cavalry waited in hiding. The northern side of the valley looked impossible for any horse. It was perilously steep and stony, and the hope was that Rodolfo’s forces would assume an attack was coming from the south, and would direct their attention there.