There were almost none in Marek’s camp, though, except the ones held by the handful of guards, and one lamp shining inside his pavilion. “Yes,” Sarkan said. “He’s doing something.” He turned to the table: he’d laid out half a dozen volumes of defensive magic. But I stayed at the window and stared down, frowning. I could feel the gathering of magic that had a flavor of Solya, but there was something else, something moving slow and deep. I still couldn’t see anything. Only a few guards on their rounds.

Inside Marek’s pavilion, a shape passed between the lantern and the tent wall and flung a shadow against the wall, a face in profile: a woman’s head, hair piled high, and the sharp peaks of the circlet she wore. I jerked back from the window, panting, as if she’d seen me. Sarkan looked back at me, surprised.

“She’s here,” I said. “The queen is here.”

There wasn’t time to think what it meant. Marek’s cannon roared out with gouts of orange fire, a horrible noise, and clods of dirt went flying as the first cannon-balls smashed into the outer wall. I heard Solya give a great shout, and light blazed up all across Marek’s camp: men were thrusting coals into beds of straw and kindling that they had laid down in a line.

A wall of flame leaped up to face my wall of stone, and Solya stood behind it: his white robe was stained with orange and red light, blowing out from his wide-spread arms. His face was clenched with strain, as if he were lifting something heavy. I couldn’t hear the words over the roar of the fire, but he was speaking a spell.

“Try to do something about that fire,” Sarkan told me, after one quick look down. He whirled back to his table and pulled out one of the dozen scrolls he’d prepared yesterday, a spell to blunt cannon-fire.

“But what—” I began, but he was already reading, the long tangled syllables flowing like music, and I was out of time for questions. Outside, Solya bent his knees and heaved up his arms as if he were throwing a large ball. The whole wall of flame jumped into the air and curved up over the wall and into the trench where the baron’s men crouched.

Their screams and cries rose up with the crackling of the flames, and for a moment I was frozen. The sky was wide and too-clear above, stars from end to end, not a cloud anywhere that I could wring rain from. I ran for the water-jug in the corner, in desperation: I thought maybe if I could make one cloud grow into a storm, I could make a drop grow into a cloud.

I poured water into the cup of my hand and whispered the rain spell over it, telling the drops they could be rain, they could be a storm, a blanketing deluge, until a pool shimmered solid quicksilver in my palm. I threw my handful of water out the window, and it did become rain: a hiccup of thunder and a single gush of water that went straight down into the trench, squashing the fire down in one place.

The cannon kept roaring all the while. Sarkan was standing beside me at the window now, holding up the shield against them, but every thump struck against him like a blow. The orange fire lit his face from below, shone on his clenched teeth as he grunted with impact. I would have liked to speak to him, between the cannon rounds, to ask whether we were all right—I couldn’t tell if we were doing well, or if they were.

But the fire in the trench was still burning. I kept throwing rain, but it was hard work making rain out of handfuls of water, and it got harder as I went along. The air around me went dry and parched and my skin and hair winter-crackly, as if I was stealing every bit of moisture around me, and the torrents only struck one part of the fire at a time. The baron’s men were doing their best to help, beating down the flames with cloaks sopped into the water that ran off.

Then the two cannon roared together. But this time, the flying iron balls glowed with blue and green fire, trailing them both like comets. Sarkan was flung back hard against the table, the edge slamming into his side. He staggered, coughing, the spell broken. The two balls tore through his shield and sank into the wall almost slowly, like pushing a knife into an unripe fruit. Around them the rock seemed almost to melt away, glowing red around the edges. They vanished inside the wall, and then, with two muffled roars, they burst. A great cloud of earth went flying up, chips of stone flung so hard I heard them pattering against the walls of the tower itself, and a gap crumbled in right in the middle of the wall.

Marek thrust his spear up into the air and roared, “Forward!”

I couldn’t understand why anyone would obey: through that ragged opening, the fire still leaped and hissed, despite all my work, and men were screaming as they burned. But men did obey him: a torrent of soldiers came charging with spears held at waist-level, into the burning chaos of the trench.

Sarkan pushed himself up from the table and came back to the window, wiping a trickle of blood from his nose and lip. “He’s decided to be profligate,” he said grimly. “Each of those cannon-balls was a decade in the forging. Polnya has fewer than ten of them.”

“I need more water!” I said, and catching Sarkan’s hand I pulled him with me into the spell. I could feel him wanting to protest: he didn’t have a spell prepared to match mine. But he muttered irritation under his breath and then gave me a simple cantrip, one of the early ones he’d tried to teach me, which was meant to fill up a glass of water from the well down below us. He’d been so annoyed when I either slopped water all over his table, or barely brought up a trickle of drops. When he spoke the spell, water came rippling smoothly up to the very brim of my jug, and I sang my rain spell to the whole jug and to the well below, all that deep cold sleeping water, and then I flung the whole jug out the window.

For a moment I couldn’t see: a howl of wind blew rain spattering into my face and eyes, the slap of a biting winter rain. I wiped my face with my hands. Down in the trench, a downpour had smothered the flames entirely, only small flickering pockets left, and armored men on both sides were sliding off their feet, falling in the sudden ankle-deep torrent. The gap in the wall was gushing mud, and with the fire gone, the baron’s men were crowding into the breach with their pikes, filling it up with bristling points and shoving back the men who’d been trying to come in. I sagged against the sill with relief: we’d stopped Solya’s fire, we’d stopped Marek’s advance. He’d already spent so much magic, more than he could afford surely, and we’d still halted him; surely now he’d think better of—

“Get ready,” Sarkan said.