by Kate Elliott
“Very well.” Drake gestured. An attendant counted out coins into the lad’s hand as the boy gaped at this largesse. “Our kind are sorely ill-used here in Europa, the lands of our birth. Go with my blessing. Make a good life for yourself.”
As the lad hurried off into the night, Drake again bent his eye on the stocky young man. “Will you risk your life for a chance to join my company of mages?”
“I’m not afraid!”
“Better if you were. Fire knows no mercy. But very well. To weave fire, you must cast the backlash of the flame into another body. Otherwise it will burn you up from inside. I will raise an unlit candle. Put a spark to it. As you feel the answering burn from that combustion in your own flesh, throw it like a rope into the body of this catch-fire.”
A candle and two lamps burned at Drake’s feet. He blew them out. All sat in darkness lightened only by stars and a rising crescent moon.
“Be cautious,” added Drake. “Even the lighting of one candle can kill a fire mage.”
“I can light a candle!” boasted the young fellow.
With a snap the candle’s wick flared. Then, as in echo, the two lamp wicks began burning with a bright golden flame.
“Throw the thread of fire into the catch-fire,” said Drake. “Think of casting a line from a boat to the shore.”
The youth staggered, clapping a hand to his chest, and dropped to his knees choking. His face got very red. The lamp flames flared with such brilliance that I blinked. Then he toppled over, mouth open, tongue black, and a trickle of blood coming out of his ears.
Drake waved forward an attendant. “Dispose of him.”
Men dragged the body away as the others watched in silence.
“You never asked me,” said the third supplicant, a girl about Luce’s age.
Drake pulled off a glove. The skin was red and flaking, mottled with so many burn scars it was a wonder he could use his hands at all. He knelt and pinched out both flames. “I have nothing to ask you. The blacksmiths do not admit women to their guild. They teach them only how to lock away their fire. So either you will go home or you will try your luck.”
“Do you mean us to die?” she asked boldly. Maybe the darkness gave her courage.
“No, not at all. If you have the knack of casting off the backlash, I will train you to hone that skill and nurture your fire. But even the best-trained fire mage can die. And you must be willing to see others die, for if you make one mistake with your catch-fires, as you will, their bodies will be served as this man’s was.”
“My bridges are burned. My home will be here, or in the spirit world.”
She took in a sharp breath. The candle took flame. She sucked in a pained inhalation; I smelled a pinprick of ashy smoke. Light sparked in her eyes. Then a glowing thread spun out from her like an unwinding coil and streamed into the body of the nearest catch-fire. The man stiffened, arms rigid at his side, but the backlash was more trickle than roar.
The girl’s lips parted, and her eyes widened. Her hands raised to press at her mouth. The candle’s light danced along her pale skin. The rest of the world lay in shadow.
“Enough,” said Drake. “You have a light touch, as women often do. If you wish to walk this road, you may enlist.”
She dropped to her knees so abruptly I thought she was falling, but she was just stunned. The catch-fire relaxed as the backlash vanished. The candle burned on.
“Yes, that is my wish,” said the girl through tears.
“Remain here then, and assist with the hospital tomorrow. Under no circumstances attempt even to light a candle, not until we have had time to train you in the preliminaries.”
“Yes, my lord. Yes!” By the way she gazed raptly at him, I saw the cage he wove: He gave the fledgling fire mages a life otherwise denied them.
I fled to the library. It hurt to entertain the idea that Drake might be right about one thing.
Rory still slept. Camjiata sat alone at the desk, studying a map. He did not look up as I crept across the plush rug, for of course I was veiled in shadows.
“I can hear you moving about, Cat. Do you think I did not notice when you suddenly vanished? Dark Ataecina! Whence comes this shadow magic? Has the Hassi Barahal clan nurtured it close to their hearts all these years? Uniquely suited for a family of spies, don’t you think? Or is it only you, Cat? Not cold, not fire, but a creature as yet unclassified by the scholars.”
Fortunately, before I felt obliged to answer this salvo, all delivered in a cheerful tone, boots sounded in the corridor. I threw myself on the couch and pretended to be asleep as Drake walked in. The whiff of smoke made me choke.
“I have discovered another apt fire mage. Another girl.”
“You seem to prefer the girls, James.” Camjiata’s tone seemed distracted, but I heard the edge cutting beneath his genial disinterest.
“Girls are more malleable. More grateful, for I give them a status and independence they cannot gain elsewise. Thus they are the most loyal of all. Most of them, anyway. Not this one.” I felt the pressure of his gaze as he looked at me. I wanted to leap up and stab him, but Vai’s cautions and my promise to the radical cause stayed my hand. “Women are so grievously shallow-minded. If the arrogant cold mage weren’t so handsome and cocksure, she wouldn’t love him half as well.”
“Really, James, you must give up this unseemly obsession.”
“I care nothing for her. Angeline is far more beautiful and an equal to me besides. But she will lead me to him.”
“If you kill him, I will be seriously displeased with you.”
Drake laughed. “And then what? Then what will you do?”
Tension stung like the snap of air before a thunderstorm breaks.
“Do you want to find out, James?”
Noble Ba’al, but I had to admire the general’s self-assurance! Drake hesitated for so long I almost popped my head up just to enjoy the expression that surely soured his face. Rory prodded me with his foot. I stayed curled up.
“Without my help, your partisans would never have been able to break you out of your island prison.”
“I am aware of what I owe to you. But I am also aware of what you owe to me. You are a murderer, condemned by your own kinfolk in your own clan’s court of law.”
“They left me to burn after stealing my inheritance! Of course I acted to save myself!”
“Any justness in your actions does not change the fact that I brought you under my protection at considerable risk to my reputation.”
“You promised me an army to take back what is mine.”
“An army you shall have, once my victory is assured. How long do you think you will last without my support, James?”
“I am coming to question whether I need your support at all. My fire mages are loyal to me because they know I am the only one who will raise them up and defend them. They will never let any harm come to me. I used to think I needed your army, but now I wonder if all I need are powerful fire banes. Who would dare oppose me then?”
“A constant application of terror and grief is no way to rule.” Footsteps sounded in the corridor. “Here are my officers. Have your people ready to ride within the half hour.”
“I shall not be patient for much longer,” muttered Drake.
The instant the sting of Drake’s presence faded from the room, I kicked Rory’s shins and got up. The staff officers nodded at me; they had accepted our presence among them with the alacrity of youthful disinterest. After all, they had a war to fight. We made a meal of bread and cheese, and I was glad to have it for I suspected that many of the soldiers got nothing. Before the sun’s edge topped the horizon, the troops were moving north in their columns. The pops and cracks of gunfire signaled a skirmish far in the advance.
“This knife’s edge must be walked cautiously,” remarked Camjiata when he and I had a moment riding apart from the others. “You do understand, do not you, that if we lose this battle today, then all is lost?”
“Because the prince
s and mages will crack down so hard on dissent that it will be decades or generations before another radical movement has a chance to rise? Or because you’ll have lost control of Drake? Never believe I am selfless enough to sacrifice my husband on the altar of your empire.”
“Just buy me time, Cat. Do nothing rash.” He glanced toward where Drake rode amid his company of mages, then back to me. “Had you been my daughter, you would have been loyal to me.”
“Tara gave me the father she wanted me to have,” I said softly, but he could not hear.
The rising sun bent its rays over the landscape. The road sloped upward along a gentle rise. Rumbling booms shook the air. A frantic blaring of trumpets, as with warning calls, was followed by the crackling of gunfire, which at length subsided into an uncanny quiet that made me more nervous than anything that had come before.
We turned off the main road and entered a village empty of every soul except the soldiers moving through. On a prominence men had felled three trees that blocked the view northeast over the battlefield. Clouds bunched up in the north, dark with unshed rain. Closer at hand a dense mist concealed the high ground and thus the entirety of the Coalition army. Camjiata surveyed the mist through a spyglass.
“James, the mist seems unnatural. I expected to see Lutetia’s walls from here. Can you disperse it?”
“The mist is a fog created by cold magic. To create such an extent, across a full mile or more of ground, means many cold mages have coordinated their efforts.”
“Can your fire magic not vanquish this cold fog, James? I’m surprised to hear it.”
“I can do anything! But it’s not worth risking fire mages so close to the lines. The sun will disperse it in time.”
A smile teased Camjiata’s lips, as if Drake’s sullen defensiveness amused him, but I was sure I was the only one who noticed it. “Tell Marshal Aualos to order the artillery to begin a barrage into the mist. That will soften them and perhaps hasten the mist’s dispersal as well.”
Messengers came and went, one after the next. Sometimes they had to wait while Camjiata read dispatches and wrote replies for men ahead of them. Everything took so long as soldiers trudged into position and artillery was drawn in by horses. An hour passed, then another.
The battlefront expanded into the east, masses of men hidden by distance but also because the mist continued to hang low, not burning off even as the sun rose higher.
Finally the artillery began to fire in thundering blasts of sound. Smoke rose. I heard thumps, distant cries, the screams of horses. How must it feel to stand as death fell unseen out of the sky? How I hated this waiting! I was confident that Bee remained fairly safe in Lutetia, but where was Vai? How vulnerable was he?
Canyons of light appeared as cracks in the mist. Figures appeared and vanished like dreams of ghosts. With a rumble of hooves a troop of Coalition cavalry swept out of its misty concealment. Rifle fire from the Iberian line cracked as the infantry formed into squares to face the charge, but the horses did not crash into the square; instead, as the cavalry circled, all the rifles went silent. Out of this chaos of stillness and motion, crossbow bolts and longbow arrows flew with killing precision into the Iberian ranks. In the midst of the cavalry, despite the distance between us, I recognized Vai. I knew he would go with the first wave, put himself at risk in case the attack did not work.
Yet it did work. The desperate Iberians broke ranks to charge with their bayonets. As soon as the square’s tight formation began to disintegrate, a second cavalry charge swept out of the shredding mist and smashed right into the Iberian infantry. The lines boiled into a mass of confusion.
“A new variation on an old tactic,” remarked Camjiata to his staff. They were sweating. He was not. “Effective not just because the cold magic kills our rifles and cannon but particularly because their archers are superior to ours and naturally they have many more of them. James, if you place one fire mage in each square, can that mage then throw the backlash of their fire into the cold mages who are riding with the cavalry? Wouldn’t that kill the cold mage’s magic and leave the rifles free to fire?”
Drake brushed strands of red hair out of his eyes. The touch of his calfskin gloves left a smear of soot on his brow, but I did not mention it, for I did not like the way he looked at me. “Yes, it would, and it leaves the cold mages defenseless besides, for as long as they are acting as catch-fires, they are helpless. The best part is that the more powerful the cold mage, the more fire he can absorb and thus the more fire the fire mage can call. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Yet what can we most advantageously set on fire?” Camjiata mused. “The Coalition has many more cold mages than we do fire mages. Let your people set grass fires up the hill to keep the cold mages busy putting them out. I know you have been making some experiments with lending fire to artillery and rifles whose combustion has been killed by cold magic.”
“All of this my mages can do,” said Drake, but he seemed distracted as he scanned the field with a spyglass. Several of his wife’s soldiers always stood between him and me.
The last of the mist spun away to reveal the Coalition army deployed on the higher ground, rank upon rank of infantry. Smoke rose in billows everywhere. I could just barely make out the dark line of Lutetia’s walls in the distance. Thank Tanit the city was, for now, out of artillery range.
A staff officer had left several open bottles of wine on one of the tree stumps. I took a swallow straight from the bottle as I considered whether I should abandon Camjiata. I knew the general had to win, yet I was so afraid of what the fire mages might do. But what could I possibly do to safeguard Vai now that the battle had started? The cavalry company he had ridden down with had returned to the Coalition lines, and no doubt he had gone with them. I would never find him among the thousands and thousands of soldiers struggling in noise and smoke and blood.
Rory was pacing back and forth along the length of one of the fallen pines like a caged lion at the prowl. A crow sat on a branch, watching him. I hurried over and chased it off. He offered me an uncorked bottle from which he had been drinking.
I took a swig of a harsh sack, winced, and handed the bottle back to him. “This is awful.”
Had he been in cat shape, his ears would have been flattened to his head. “This is awful! This isn’t hunting. You creatures ought to settle your arguments in a better way. Couldn’t one general challenge another for the right to stand with the pride? Who can possibly eat all that torn meat? If it were even tasty, which man-flesh is decidedly not!”
“How do you know what man-flesh tastes like?”
He stiffened, and for an instant I was sure he was going to snarl at me.
“Rory! Answer me!”
He took a step toward me, so threatening I raised my cane. Catching himself, he took a step back, but by the way his lips gapped to show a hint of teeth, I could see he was on the edge of biting or perhaps of telling me the truth. And I was suddenly very sure that I did not want to know the answer after all.
Artillery fire boomed over us. I ducked instinctively. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“There! Look!” a staff officer shouted to be heard above the deafening rattle and shot.
I ran back to the command group just in time to see yet another cavalry charge from out of the Coalition lines. Smoke rose from the guns in billows. The churn of ground between the two armies was speckled with fallen men, injured horses, and the detritus of lost weaponry. This time, as Coalition cavalry closed with the Iberians, fire broke out in the trampled grass around them. One rider in the middle ranks collapsed as if shot. A second rider toppled from his horse. As more men fell and horses tumbled, the cavalry sheared off and raced back toward their lines. A storm of bullets rained after their retreating backs.
The fire mages had gotten their range.
Yet even in the face of these devastating casualties, still another Coalition troop galloped down toward the artillery. Riders and horses fell before the barrage, but this time where f
ire broke out it was quenched. The artillery went dead. With shouts, the Coalition troops closed. Grass fires sparked up and died. Men fought hand to hand, swords and bayonets flashing.
A young officer wearing the white sash of the Kena’ani Sacred Band rode up on a lathered horse, pushing in front of another messenger. “General! Captain Barca sends his compliments and this message: The first outriders of the Roman column have been engaged about five miles south.”
Camjiata glanced overhead to where the sun had almost reached the zenith. “We should have broken the Coalition army before now. Drake, why have your fire mages not crushed every cold mage on the field? You assured me that fire would easily defeat ice.”
“There are so many cold mages, and they’re working in concert in a way they did not before, not even at Lemovis.”
“No doubt they can learn from experience as well as we can,” remarked Camjiata as he took a spyglass from an orderly. “Matters grow urgent. Lord Marius need only hold his ground and not retreat until the Romans arrive, and then we will be crushed between anvil and hammer. Our frontal attacks are hurting them, but not fast enough.”
He examined the sprawling field of battle in all its churning confusion, so many thousands of men that it seemed the earth crawled. “There. See how the Invictus Legion holds its ground. We have to turn their flank, for a frontal attack will not break them.”
He angled the spyglass to the north. About half a mile away a fortified estate stood amid the green crowns of an orchard. I remembered passing the house and gardens with Lord Gwyn’s skirmishers, who had told me it was called Red Mount. The compound had two walls, an outer wall that ringed the orchard and gardens and an inner wall that fortified the stone house. The flag of the Tarrant infantry, Lord Marius’s own crack troops, flew from the main house.
A column of Iberian infantry had laid siege to the estate an hour earlier. As we watched, a skirmish raged. Fire scorched across the orchard. Defenders hiding in the trees raced for the inner wall to escape the flames, but even as they were running the flames were sucked right out, killed by cold magic. Crossbow bolts rained over the wall, pummeling the Iberian infantry as it tried to advance. The struggle within the walled orchard was not visible, nor from this distance could I hear the sounds of whatever desperate melee was taking place beneath the trees.