Chapter 11: The Armory

The first arrow hit the cart in front of us and stuck there, quivering.

A woman screamed.

The horses reared.

The sergeant's guards bunched up at the front with their swords out, twelve farm boys staring up at fifty men on the rocks.

Behind us, the riders at the mouth of the ravine didn't charge.

They waited.

In the middle of them, on a gray horse, sat a man with a long face and a pistol in his belt.

"The hunter," I said.

"He sold us to the hill men," Rook said. "They get the carts. He gets me."

"Can you fight fifty?"

"No." He was already out of the box and pulling his knife. "Get the boy under the wagon."

"Rook."

"Under the wagon, Bryony."

It was the first time he'd said my name.

I didn't get under the wagon.

I climbed into the back of it, behind the canvas, and took my mother's key out of my collar.

The flap was a door. It was all I needed.

I stepped into the cold.

The Draycott armory stood exactly where I'd left it. Racks of crossbows. Barrels of bolts. Spears. Shields with the black Draycott tower on them.

I grabbed an armful of crossbows and stepped back out into the wagon.

Then I did it again.

And again.

When I pushed the flap open, there were twenty crossbows on the wagon bed and four barrels of bolts.

"Cook!" I shouted. "Steward! Everyone who can pull a string!"

The cook got there first.

She stared at the wagon.

"Don't ask," I said. "Shoot."

She picked up a crossbow like she'd done it all her life.

"My husband was a sergeant at arms," she said. "Who do you think taught him?"

The officers' wives came running. Women whose husbands had died at the Pass.

Women who'd been married to soldiers for twenty years and had never once been handed a weapon.

They took them.

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