The Siege of Shelter Island was nearly done, its stone crumbled to dust beneath the barrage from the surrounding peninsula, its armed and armored warriors nothing but a memory that too would soon be snuffed out; for, by morning, the wives and children of the Sleepless Scions of the East would be no more. Black ships drew nearer to bash through shattered docks or run aground on cold sandy beaches, soldiers seething through the castle’s keep in leather boots. The Black Mare’s Conquerors cut down every barrier between themselves and the Sleepless Throne.

But the woman who would come to be known as Cloudy knew none of this, holed up in the drawing room behind the castle's throne room with the other mothers, the queen-mother holding what would be her last court, children playing on the plush woolen carpet, heedless of the fates of their erstwhile defenders.

“I love your drapes,” said the Fisher Baroness, half an octave above obsequiousness and only a single note below panic, “I find emerald to be so calming.”

The queen-mother launched into a tale of their procurement from a merchant of the Orchard Clan. It was a lie of course, but she couldn’t well say they had been a gift from the Black Mare herself, woven from the hides of fat western sheep, grazing on rolling western lands, in a time before the conqueress had set her sights on the Eastern Islands as well.

In any case, Cloudy barely registered the prattle. It was perhaps the tenth time one of the various high ladies of the Sleepless Kingdom had grasped at conversational straws to drown out the silence that now bombardment their walls. Each time, the queen-mother would make a valiant attempt at reclaiming their attention as if this were a voluntary social gathering, altering truths where they might stray too close to the actual purpose of their collective seclusion, but beneath the strained tales, honesty lurked immutable.

It hid behind the tight smiles of duchesses and dames, the former clutching the leather-thronged jewels at their throats, the latter clutching flint knives secreted within their woolen gowns that they wouldn’t get to use. It seethed through the squeals of pleasure from the playing children, shadowing forth a time when their cries would mean something else entirely. It lived in the mundane objects the ladies chose to compliment: the drapes drawn tight against the castle’s shuttered windows, the rug where the last living children on the island played, the oaken door with the heavy bar across it, the gowns that some ladies had time to don before rushing from their beds, or the rough-cut jewels they had never taken from their bodies once news of the Black Mare’s movements had reached the keep, the last things they owned.

Cloudy herself made no such attempts at conviviality. No shining stones nor fine fabrics could have saved her husband’s life, for he must surely be somewhere beyond the seawalls, crushed by falling stone, pierced by flying missile, or else butchered by the watered stone blades of the invaders. No skill with brush, nor harp, nor even bow could have stopped Cloudy’s father, an old bent man, from going out into the hall, leaning on sun-hardened spear as he went, to die standing between danger and daughter, for however brief a time. Even now, the muted clatter of flint and wood and bone wafted from the hallways nearby. Neither flattery, nor guile, nor feminine wiles would save her baby boy when those oaken doors fell inward, and now the first resounding booms shimmered through the drawing room, like stones cast into a tidepool, rippling through the rigidly seated women, but seeming to pass straight over the young ones at their feet.

“Children!” the queen-mother nearly shrieked. She clapped her hands. “Children? Who wants a sweetie?”

“Me! Me!” Games and toys instantly forgotten, the innocent little creatures crowded around the queen-mother, like kittens to a teet, as an aged serving woman bent to hold a tray at the elbow of the matriarch.

“There’s one for each of you,” she said as she applied the warmest smile she could muster, “Don’t be greedy now. Only one apiece for now or you’ll spoil your supper.” Handing a morsel to each child, her smile never faded, but her eyes were sharp as a hawk’s. They passed over and took note of each small face, turning away one boy who had crammed his whole sweet straight into his mouth in hopes of freeing his hands for a second.

One for each of them, no more, no less…

Cloudy saw her own child crowded in among them, and she reached involuntarily forward as her boy sank his teeth into a gelatinous gummy thing that made his teeth turn red as he turned back to smile at his mother in pure bliss. Cloudy mirrored his smile automatically, though it felt as if the earth were falling away, spinning into the abyss, and she alone seemed to notice that nothing was beneath them now. Nothing held them up.

She hadn’t been asked. She was the boy’s mother and no one had bothered to ask her! She would have agreed, of course; no mother would deny her child these last few carefree moments, but even so it should have been her choice! The queen-mother should have asked!

She almost leapt forward to wrench the sweet from her child’s hand, rake her fingers across the boy’s tongue and gums, turn the boy over and shake him until he wretched, but then what? Agony, fear, pain? No, that was not the way. Perhaps it could have been. Perhaps there could have been another way, but the opportunity to change her mind had passed.

So Cloudy froze the smile to her face, long after her boy had finished his sweetie and gone back to play with the other children, not noticing his mother’s shivering.

The room was growing silent now, save for the booming of the oaken door, yet Cloudy barely noticed the serving woman slide up beside her with the ivory tray of little goblets, their contents looking for all the world like something sweet and strong for the grown-ups. Cloudy took hers automatically, as the first of the children lay down their heads down on the woolen rug beside their toys.

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Cloudy’s eyes flicked to the little girl’s mother. Dances-through-foxglove, daughter of the queen-mother and princess of the Sleepless Kingdom, waited until her child had stilled and then upended the goblet in one go, hands returning to a prim posture at her navel, shaking but empty now as the serving woman pried the empty goblet from the princess’s fingers.

One by one, the children fell asleep in a pile, like kits in a hollow, while the hounds scratched at the door. She could see her own boy's hair, face turned away from her as he lay atop one of his playmates’ softly rising belly. She longed to reach out and stroke that hair, but something held her back. As the children each stilled around him, Cloudy’s eyes never left her boy’s own shoulders, rising, falling. Rising, falling. Rising… Falling…

She swatted angry tears from her eyes with one hand and then the other. Damn the boy’s father for dying on the seawall with the rest of them. Damn the boy’s grandfather for being killed in the hallway by the blades of their enemies. Damn the queen-mother and the princess and everyone else in this damned drawing room.

Damn myself. Damn myself. Damn myself.

She heard the oaken door shatter and heavy boots cross the carpet. Her fingers ached as she gripped the ivory goblet, as if they had been frozen there by the north wind. She heard a man shout and draw near, but still, she did not drink of the queen-mother’s last gift. She wanted to hurt. She wanted to feel the blade run through her stomach to punch through her spine and spill out what little was left of her. She wanted to die in fear and in agony for what she had done, for what she had allowed to happen. She wanted to be damned.

Nothing moved before her now, but she heard a man step up beside her. She flinched… but no stone sword ran her through. Instead, a big hand closed around her own shaking, frozen ones and prized lose the goblet. A soft voice spoke beside her.

Cloudy blinked.

“Miss?”

The muscles of Cloudy’s neck creaked as she pulled her gaze away from her boy’s hair in increments, like the ticking of a clockwork ballista, and eventually her eyes aimed at a warm, brown face, lined with years of sea and salt and sun.

“Miss?” The man knelt before her and her face was level with his. Her eyes flicked to his boots. He was no Maresman.

“Who…” was all Cloudy was able to get out, before her voice faltered.

The man looked from the woman, to the other men who moved throughout the room, not killing, or fighting, or raging through the queen-mother’s drawing room like conquerors, but bending toward the faces of the women that slumped in the chairs, turning over the small figures that piled in the center of the play-rug and caressing hair and cheeks and breathless lips.

“We are Galleymen, from the Land of Pine,” the man was saying, “Are you…”

***

Windstalker tried again to form the question, and finally managed “Do you have children?” though he thought he might know the answer.

The woman made no reply, eyes wide as if she were sunblind.

Windstalker’s second in common, a man called Pitchfoot, gave a small shake of his head as he rose up from the last of the small bodies. Whoever this woman was, whatever she had been a day ago, she was no longer a mother, for there were no children left here. She was no longer a Scion of the Sleepless Kingdom, for there was no longer a kingdom by that name. Whoever she had been to the people around her – within the shattered walls and without – there was no one left alive but her.

The frozen woman’s eyes flicked to Pitchfoot, then back to him, then to the row of small bodies laid out before the court of corpses. Slowly the woman’s face thawed, then cracked, then broke entirely into a deafening wail, as she heaved forward. Pitchfoot caught her and held her, despite her desperate struggle.

The woman clawed over the big Galleyman’s shoulders as if trying to reach something, reaching for…

“Let her go, Pitch,” said Windstalker, voice soft and studiously flat.

Pitch turned questioning eyes at his commander. No, horrified eyes.

“I said let her go.”

Pitch held her a moment longer, still disbelieving, then he lifted his arms. The woman shot past him like a shivered arrow and fell beside a small boy with black hair. She bent to the boy and sobbed, mechanically stroking the boy’s hair as she cradled his head, rocking back and forth.

She alternated between sobs and whispers, and then, only when she went still and cocked her head to the side like a listening doe, did Windstalker stiffen, ready for whatever might come next.

At once she launched to her feet, running across the rug in two chaotic, lurching bounds toward the chair she had once been frozen to, and the goblet that had been stuck to her hands on the small table beside it. Windstalker had only a moment to realize what was in that goblet and why she was the last scion left alive. He had even less than a moment to make a decision, an impossibly complex one, and as she dove for the goblet, Windstalker did not stop her. He had picked up his whalebone spear but stayed it.

The woman crashed into the table, hands fumbling the goblet as it fell to the ground, spilling out and soaking into the plush play-rug.

“Noooo,” crooned the woman, head to the now stained carpet, “Nonononono…”

She devolved into rocking whispers once more, this time cradling nothing but her own frozen hands, and Windstalker looked on with face impassive. Then, finally, he nodded to Pitchfoot, who picked up the now torpid woman by the arms and took her away from this scene of death and sorrow.

“How long?” one of his men asked him. Distantly, Windstalker was aware that it was Drumbeat, one of the youngest of his men, out on blue water for only a season, now.

Windstalker’s face finally broke, but he covered it by adjusting a strap of his leather armor that had come loose in the fighting. “Hours,” said the older Galleyman, then turning his eyes away from a slumped older woman, ivory tray dangling from her hand, dribbled of crimson liquid at the corner of her mouth. He gestured back to the woman Pitch had taken away. “That one must have sat like that for hours. There was nothing we could have done, Drumbeat. Fight fiercer, run faster, sail the wind better, we still would have missed them.”

Drumbeat nodded at that absently, then after a moment, nodded again more definitively. Finally, saying nothing, the young Galleyman walked away to make himself busy somewhere else, perhaps anywhere else.

Windstalker bent to the boy that the lone surviving woman had cried over and placed a hand upon the small cheek. It was still warm, still flush, the scent of lifebreathe still fresh on the boy’s lips.

Death had come for the last Scions of the Sleepless Kingdom only heartbeats too soon.