The Siege of Macindaw

33

The Siege of Macindaw

She hurried to the table and seized paper and a graphite chalk. She knew Will would wait until she was ready. Back at the window, she raised the lamp in a vertical line, up and down three times. The white light outside mirrored the action. In her peripheral vision, she could see the moving colored lights flashing and winking away. She even realized that another red light had joined the display. But her attention was focused on the white light.

It began to flash, and she noted down the letters as Will sent them.

The Courier's code was a simple but effective system. Twenty-four of the letters of the alphabet were arranged in a grid of four numbered lines, six letters to a line. To achieve an even grid, the letters Z and W were omitted. S and V would take their place if necessary.

This meant that the letter A was represented by the cipher 1-1, being the first line of the grid and the first letter in the line.

By the same token, G would be 2-1, and P would be 3-4. The person sending the message would stipulate the line number by holding the lamp in a specific corner of the square. Top left was 1, top right 2, bottom left 3 and bottom right 4.

For example, if the signal lamp were moved to the bottom left corner, then back to the center where it was flashed twice, the receiver would know it meant third row, second letter, or N.

Unlike Will, who had to draw up the grid to compose his message – a fact that Halt would have found highly unsatisfactory – Alyss knew the grid by heart and could note the letters down directly as they were sent.

The light flashed out steadily. To the untrained eye, it was just another random flashing light in the forest. But to Alyss, the series of flashes were as easy to read as an open book. She noted them down quickly. She smiled once. Will was not a rapid sender. Any Courier would easily beat him. Then she realized that speed was less important than accuracy and he was probably fiercely intent on his task, the tip of his tongue protruding, as it always did when he was concentrating.

The light moved vertically several times, then disappeared, signaling that the message was finished. She seized her own lamp and replied with the same signal, then turned to read what she had scribbled down. She was pretty sure she had read it accurately as it was transmitted, but it paid to make sure. She moved her finger along the letters. They were roughly scribbled and uneven, as she had written them with her eyes firmly riveted on the light.

There was no punctuation in the code, of course, but she understood that Will would be firing a message arrow through her window in ten minutes and was warning her to be clear of the window. The work ACK was a standard code shortcut for acknowledge. The sign-off, LOVE WILL, was highly irregular. That sort of personal touch had been frowned on during her training. She smiled once more. You could read the words before her as saying she was to acknowledge the message itself, or the two-word ending, LOVE WILL.

"Either way," she murmured to herself. Hastily, she picked up her lamp and moved it vertically in the window three times: up, down, up. It was the standard signal for acknowledge.

Then she drew the curtain well back from the window and scanned the forest one last time. The colored lights continued to flash, and now the white light was swinging in an arc. There was no more signaling, she realized. They were just keeping the light show going. Below, on the battlements, the sentries had grown bored with the lights. The murmur of voices she had heard before had died away as sergeants ordered the men back to their duties.

She kissed her fingertips gently and blew a kiss out into the dark night.

" Thanks, Will," she said softly. She set the lamp in the center of the windowsill to provide him with an aiming point, then moved to one side to wait for his arrow.

Once he had seen Alyss's acknowledgment, Will started to move forward from his position just inside the tree line. As he had done previously, he ghosted from one patch of shadow to the next, blending with the natural movements of the night and becoming part of the landscape.

After five years of rigorous training under Halt's watchful eye – and with occasional input from Gilan, the Ranger Corps's acknowledged master of concealed movement – he didn't need to think about his actions any longer. They had become instinctive. He had already picked the spot from where he would shoot. He had to be within a hundred meters of the castle walls, allowing for the extra distance the arrow would have to travel to reach the top of the tower. There was a slight knoll crowned by a clump of large bushes some ninety meters from the wall. The additional few meters of height would be an advant age, as would the broken, shifting shadows formed by the bushes, with their dappled patterning of white snow and dark foliage. He would blend easily into the landscape there, allowing him to stand and aim carefully.

He frowned as he thought about that. He would have to aim just above the lamp Alyss had placed in the center of the window. That would mark the gap between the heavy iron bars. It would be the height of bad luck if he got this far and fired his arrow only to have it strike one of the bars and fall to the courtyard below. He wondered if he should have written his message to Alyss in code but then shrugged away the thought. There hadn't been time to encode a full message, and besides, if the arrow missed its mark and was found, it wouldn't matter if Keren were to read about the stellatite pebble and its properties. It would have already been lost to Alyss anyway.

He had, however, encoded the last few lines of the letter, setting up a schedule for further signaling. It would definitely be a problem if that should fall into Keren's hands. If he knew Alyss had a method of signaling, Keren might be able to compel her, under the influence of his mesmerism, to send a signal that would set some kind of trap for Will.

The bushes on the small knoll were waist high, and he was able to rest for a few minutes, crouched among them, while he gathered his thoughts and prepared for the shot ahead of him.

He looked long and hard at the small lighted square that was the tower window, with the brighter point at the center bottom that marked the lamp itself. He studied it, judging distances and height and calculating how his arrow would travel in a long arc to reach the window. He would have to aim high above the point he wanted to hit, but he didn't think about that. When the time came, he would select his elevation instinctively. It would have to be a little higher than normal, he reminded himself, as he was using the take-down recurve bow that Crowley had supplied him with, and it was not quite as powerful as the longbow he had carried for the past two years. He set that thought in his mind and knew that his instincts would process it when the time came to shoot.

He closed his eyes and in his imagination saw the arcing path that would take the arrow high over the walls and into the window at the top of the tower. Halt had often reminded him of an old archery master's dictum: Before you shoot your arrow, see it fly a thousand times in your mind.

Well, he smiled wryly, he didn't have time for a thousand imaginary shots tonight. But the saying was an exaggeration in any event. It was simply a reminder to prepare for the shot by setting a successful outcome in his mind. Think of a positive outcome, and you will achieve it. Allow doubt to enter your mind, and the doubt will become self-fulfilling.

He took a few deep breaths, clearing his mind. The conscious preparation was over. Now he would allow his instincts, the result of hundreds of hours of practice and thousands of arrows fired, to take over and produce the shot that he wanted.

He rose slowly to his feet. Although at least a dozen pairs of eyes on the castle wall were turned in his direction, not a soul saw him. He drew the message arrow from his quiver and nocked it to the bowstring. The weight and balance were perfect, as a result of Malcolm's painstaking weighing and measuring back at the house in the forest. The healer was used to dealing in exact weights and measures, and Will knew this arrow would fly like any other arrow in his quiver.

He brought his left arm – the bow arm – up and, at the same time, began a smooth draw back on the string with his right, continuing to pull until the tip of his right index finger just touched the corner of his mouth. He felt for the right elevation, sensed that he was a little low and raised the bow in his sighting picture. If he had been asked at that moment why he made that final adjustment, he would not have been able to answer. It was a matter of empirical feeling, not a calculated action.

His vision was fixed on the window high above him, with the arrow now pointing well above the target. There was a slight wind from the left, and he compensated for it, knowing from experience that it would grow stronger the higher the arrow traveled.

There were two ways to destroy accuracy, he knew. One was to wait too long and concentrate too hard, so that the muscles of the arms began to tighten and tremble against the tension of the bow. The other was to shoot too quickly, so that the right-hand fingers snatched at the string during the release.

The ideal was to find a midpoint, where the action was smooth and continuous. Unhurried, but not overlong.

Then, when he felt the moment was right, when the elevation and windage and draw were all correct, he let the bowstring slip gently from his fingers, with a deep-throated twang, speeding the arrow on its way.

The moment he released, he knew the shot was perfect. He saw the arrow briefly as it streaked up into the night, then lost sight of it. Slowly, he lowered the bow, waiting. He saw a momentary flicker of movement against the lit square of the window but thought that it was more likely that his mind was playing tricks on him, causing him to see it because he wanted to see it.

He waited, standing like a statue, his cloak wrapped around him so that he merged into the background. Then he felt a vast surge of relief as the lamp began to move.

Up down, up down, up down, it went. Message received. Nodding in satisfaction, Will turned and began to make his way back to the tree line. There was nothing more to be done tonight.