Lin was dead. The words hit him harder than he’d thought they would, after all the pain she’d caused him, and his family. Strange.
“Yes,” he said. “At least, that’s what I saw, along the southern lines. D’Arrent has her soldiers marching east now. And like I said, she could use you.”
Sarine wore a resolute look, turning toward her uncle, who’d come to rest nearby, leaning against his broom.
“I’m sorry, Uncle,” Sarine said. “I have to leave again.”
Her uncle said something in the Sarresant tongue, and Tigai turned aside as she wrapped her arms around him, exchanging words he knew weren’t meant for him. The whole thing seemed too big: layers upon layers of magi, plots and politics and games. Shame stung him, at the thought he might betray Sarine’s trust, but he couldn’t outright dismiss it as an option. Whatever the old man in the starfield had wanted with her, it was hard to deny she wielded power beyond anything he’d seen before they’d met. For now it was enough to stay close. The rest could be decided later.
“Are you ready?” she asked him after she and her uncle had separated.
“I’ll need a few hours, before I use the strands again,” he said. “I traveled halfway across the world, coming here.”
“I can take us,” she said. “Which light is it? Or, I think you have a tether to one of them. Would that be the right one?”
Wind spirits but that was unnerving. He wanted nothing more than to distance himself from magi, and ended up arm-in-arm with the most powerful woman he’d ever seen or heard of, on either side of the Divide.
“Yes,” he said. “And if you’re ready, I’m bloody ready, too.”
74
ERRIS
2nd Corps Command Tents
The Road to Orstead, Old Sarresant
They’ll try to concentrate here,” she said, earning silent nods from her division commanders, “along these ridges. We have to expect their kaas-mages to focus here, and here, until their batteries are in place atop the heights.”
“A sound battle plan, if we had the enemy’s position and advantages,” Field-Marshal Etaigne said. “I wonder, Your Majesty, if we should fall back to better ground.”
She nodded, pointing to a stretch of farmland crisscrossed with roads and fences just north of the city. “Our enemy will expect us to deploy here. But we’re too far extended to the east, and he knows it. He has ninety thousand Thellan and Gand soldiers coming up the trade roads from the south. By now he knows we’ve abandoned our fortifications there. All he has to do is dig in on high ground and wait for his reinforcements to arrive. A defensive strategy leaves us exposed to an envelopment. We must attack, and he’ll know that, too. But he’ll never expect an attack on the heights.”
“Your Majesty, with respect, such an attack is suicide,” Royens said. Vassail nodded along with her commander’s sentiments.
“We have the advantage of numbers,” Erris said.
“But Your Majesty, the kaas-mages …” de Tourvalle said.
“That was a trick that could only work once,” she replied. “Paendurion knows we’ll have trained our soldiers to expect it; when the kaas-mages strike, our lines will fall back, and we’ll commit our binders to counter them. Our soldiers won’t rout for one spot of panic again.”
“We’d have three, maybe four hours,” Vassail said. “Before they can bring batteries up those ridges and get them firing. After that, they won’t need kaas-mages to break us.”
“We’ll deploy here,” Erris said, “on the fields outside the city, massed as though we intend to try an assault over open ground. We look disorderly, Old Sarresant and Gand units mixed in with the command, as though the logistics of the attack have been delayed due to their inclusion.”
Vassail nodded. “We could strike with cavalry to harry their artillery wagons while the rest of the army puts on its show.”
“A fine idea, General,” she said. “But make it a strike against their supply train. They’ll be trailing behind, here”—she pointed to a stretch of forested flatlands to the southeast—“where your cavalry can use the trees to magnify your numbers in their scouts’ reports.”
“My cavalry, Your Majesty?” Vassail said.
“I want you in command of the first raiding force. De Tourvalle, give her the Fourteenth and the Eleventh; Etaigne, half the Twenty-Second.”
Both her corps commanders bowed, turning to relay the command to their aides.
“We still need an answer for those guns, Your Majesty,” General Wexly, the Gand commander, said. “And even with binders and discipline, those kaas-mages are all but impassable barriers for the bulk of our soldiers.”
“That command falls to me,” she said. “The second raiding force: eighty fullbinders, drawn from volunteers among every brigade in all three armies.”
Silence descended through the tent.
“Your Majesty, with respect,” Royens said. “Your Need bindings are the glue that holds this army in place. Without you here, in command, we can’t hope to coordinate our attacks.”
“I can liaise between units from atop Jiri’s back,” she said. “But there is to be no attack, until we’ve turned the Sardian guns to start firing into their own lines. And then, the only order is this: full assault. Hold nothing back. We commit everything, and sweep the enemy position with every gun, every binder, every horse and soldier we have.”
“You mean to let them get their guns in place, and take them?” Wexly said.
“That’s right,” she said. “The enemy will never expect it. No brilliance, no maneuver. Only boldness, and raw nerve.”
“Bloody madness,” Colonel Marquand said from among the division commanders. The rest eyed him with a mix of frowns and agreement on their faces. “But sir, that is, Your Majesty, count me as your first volunteer.”
She met Marquand’s eyes, sharing a grim nod that melted into mutual understanding. Perhaps he’d earn himself a general’s star, if they survived.
“The rest of you, unless you have questions, you’re dismissed. We have a great many orders to deliver before daybreak. See to your divisions, and your corps. Gods watch over all of you, and go with their blessings.”
She slid her bronze spyglass open, raising it to survey the ridges on the eastern horizon. Different, when she saw a battlefield through a tube instead of a cartographer’s eyes. But she could see both versions at once: The craggy heights corresponded to black topographical lines, where she knew the double-horseshoe shape of the two ridges ahead converged to present steep faces in her direction, and scalable trails behind. The bulk of the enemy’s deployment awaited them there, spread on either side of the hills.
Jiri followed the rest of Marquand’s company without prompting or guidance, while she did her last hours of scouting, between the spyglass and Need.
“Now’s the time, sir,” Marquand said. “We have to decide. North or south?”
She swept the spyglass in both directions. Green flags decorated the heights already, with more spread on either side.
“I make ten, maybe twelve divisions,” she said. “And the latest reports at field command confirm.”
“Seventy thousand, then?” Essily said. He’d been the second volunteer, if Marquand was the first, riding just behind Jiri near the head of the column.
“We’ve gone as far as we can go behind the tree line,” Marquand said. “Either we cut across the fields and approach the heights from the north, or continue on this way and hit them from the south. And I’d feel a damned sight better if you’d planned a diversionary attack from the direction we’re not going, to cover our movement.”
“No,” she said, scanning back with her spyglass one last time. “He has to think we’re the diversion.”
By now the rest of their column had come to a halt just behind them. Eighty binders, the precise number she’d asked for, and she could have had three times that number if she’d continued taking volunteers. A miniature cavalry brigade, and likely the deadliest unit ever a
ssembled on a modern battlefield.
“Sir, with respect, we need to make a call. Which route?”
“South,” she said, snapping the spyglass shut. “Keep us moving, Marquand. I need to relay the latest dispositions to field command.”
He nodded, already heeling his mount back to give the orders for a southern approach.
She let Jiri follow his lead, for now. In another hour she would have her full attention here, but until they were engaged, she could keep a foot in both worlds. Seventy thousand. That was the count she’d expected for the Sardian army, all green flags and sigils of their crossed spears in gold. Not a single sign of the black flags of Skovan among them. Either Paendurion’s diplomacy had failed, or he had sixty thousand Skovan soldiers waiting somewhere nearby, somewhere none of her scouts had yet managed to discern. Instinct demanded caution, but if she’d learned anything facing Paendurion, it was that her instincts were wrong. Boldness, and surprise, had to be the order of the day. With the sun almost at its apex, she couldn’t yet tell who had the initiative. An improvement, by her reckoning, since the last time she’d faced him.
She found Need atop Jiri’s back as Marquand gave the orders to move the company into the open. He’d see them coming, soon, following the roads toward his southern lines. At her back, his scouts would already have mapped her positions, over a hundred thousand strong, deploying in the fields outside the town, a league beyond the range of his long guns.
“Report,” she said through her vessel, already studying the maps for updates as Jiri moved her closer to the enemy.
“Hold.” She heard Marquand give the order. “No Shelter before two hundred paces.”
Her senses still lurched between the command tents and the battlefield. She’d stayed too long in her vessel’s skin, working out the logistics of the southernmost division’s buffering line against the Thellan and Gand armies. Marquand’s order was the very one she’d have given, if she’d been present to do it.
A double-thick line of soldiers in green opposed them, kneeling and brandishing their muskets like a spear-wall from antiquity. The ground was level, though the heights began less than a league from the enemy’s flank, a slow climb up the jutting hills overlooking the field. Impossible to say precisely how dense the enemy’s line would be, behind the front ranks, but they’d have a better vantage after they made the ascent. Perhaps Paendurion would read this attack as a scouting effort. All the better if he did.
“Forward,” Marquand called, urging his mount to a canter to set the pace for the rest. She drew her saber as the order came to ready weapons, thundering toward the enemy line. Jiri’s powerful strides pushed the others’ mounts faster, and they covered ground from six hundred paces to five hundred, then four, then three.
The first volley came like the first peal of thunder. Smoke erupted from the Sardian line in two waves, starting on either end and rippling inward, and horses screamed around her, their riders falling as the rest of them advanced.
The soldiers in green lowered their musket spear-wall, hastily cramming powder and balls into place for a second round. Marquand raised his saber as their horses thundered forward, covering fifty paces in a matter of moments, calling orders for Shelter before the next volley.
When the phalanx formed again, raised muskets leveled to fire, Marquand and the rest of their company had crossed half the remaining distance between them. They had to look like madmen, in the Sardians’ eyes, and all the more so if those troops hadn’t yet been bloodied. She knew the desperation of an untested unit, facing its first charge: Her company’s pace promised they would get at most one more volley before their lines collided. Raw recruits would stare at such a thing only half believing it could happen to them, no matter how effective their training.
The Sardians fired, and this time Shelter sprang into place, hazy barriers conjured in the moments between the volley and the horses storming through where the binders let them disperse. Mind accompanied Shelter, and their line tripled in size. Body sped others, and their mounts, and Death cut down the Sardians’ feeble attempts at erecting Shelter of their own.
In an instant, they’d transformed from a scouting company on a mad charge against a thousand times their number to death, swift and sure, coming for the Sardians faster than they could hope to escape.
The last fifty paces blurred as Jiri shot forward, Body adding power to her mount’s already-thundering stride. Mind had produced five copies of her and Jiri both; Death cut down an attempt to put a barricade in her way; Life sharpened her senses enough to see every wide-eyed stare, every man on the verge of throwing down his musket and fleeing the field; Entropy held itself at the ready, waiting for the moment before impact to char their lines in waves of fire.
Jiri trampled the first men they met, and she cut another down with her steel. Flames exploded at their backs as the green soldiers turned and broke. Screams, smothered by warcries from her company, filled the air as the front ranks shattered in smoke and blood.
Speed. Speed was the order of the day, and Marquand raced ahead, punching through the Sardian lines surrounded by a fireball of his own making. She rallied behind him, repeating his order, hearing the same carried by every volunteer in earshot:
“Forward! Forward, to the heights!”
Blue forms blurred with green, and she danced between them, lashing out with her saber. Pistols and muskets paled against Entropy and steel.
“Go,” she shouted at Marquand, and he obeyed without a second glance.
Hooves pounded behind her as she and five other Sarresant binders spread themselves across the trail, a tight spiral of level ground switchbacking up the heights. The rest of their company followed Marquand’s charge. There would be a regiment’s strength coming, and more behind them. It fell to her, and any of her binders unlucky enough to have taken arms beside her, to hold while Marquand and the rest of their company scaled the heights.
Shelter closed around her, and she snapped a Death tether through it, leaping from higher ground into a knot of three Body binders in green facing off with one of hers. Jiri had gone with Marquand, sparing her only a snort when she’d dismounted. This dance she did on foot, parrying a slash from a curved blade and punching the man who wielded it in the jaw, shattering teeth and bone and sending him staggering downhill, collapsing into a bush. The other two turned from their quarry, but too late, each taking a blast from her Entropy. Shouting followed, and two of her Mind copies rushed ahead of her, driven by her subconscious, raising their sabers to attack a squad of musketmen running alongside one of the women in gold.
The soldiers dropped to their knees and fired, and she snapped Shelter into place as her copies blinked to become wisps of smoke. Another Sarresant binder charged that squad, swinging a double-thick saber as he hewed them down like paper.
She turned her attention to another Sardian, and a renewed attempt to cut her tethers with Death. This one stared at her with full concentration, while a woman guarded his back. She feinted a charge, then pulled back, drawing the Death binder’s bodyguard into an overextended lunge. A chop for the woman’s sword sent it clattering to the ground, and a second took her head, Body giving her the power to slice clean through the spine. The Death binder blinked, staring at her as though his tethers should have stopped her on their own. Her saber answered his surprise with a twisting strike through his gut, wrenching his intestines into the sun as she pulled her blade free.
More musket fire sounded around her, and she trusted Life and Body to give her the speed and awareness to raise Shelter if any were aiming at her. Sardian soldiers poured behind the green-cloaked binders, following them to chase Marquand’s company up the trail to the ridges. By now the bulk of her forces would be deploying in the fields to the west, moving within range of the long guns in anticipation of the order to charge. She had to delay, to buy Marquand time before she withdrew.
She summoned a wall of Shelter blocking the trail behind her, with all the force she could manage, making a min
iature Great Barrier between the late-arriving infantry and the rest of the fight. Death assaulted it at once from multiple angles, and she held it in place, driving white pearls to patch the holes they tore as quick as they could make them. One of the Sardians pointed at her as she did it, and he and two of his fellows ran at her, curved blades in hand.
Entropy fizzled before it could form, though she hadn’t seen Death attack her tethers. No time for wonder. She ducked the first man’s swipe, then parried the second. All three men moved faster than any common soldier, but her Body was stronger, her movements tighter, turning her saber with greater precision in every stroke. She hamstrung one of them with a deep cut along his calf, then struck three blows against the other: swatting his blade aside, making a gash across his chest, severing his left arm below the shoulder.
She slowed down.
Again, she hadn’t seen Death, but something had robbed her of Body just as one of them made his attack. She stuttered to a halt, having expected a burst of speed and power, bringing her saber up barely in time to deflect the man’s blow and feeling herself shoved off-balance by the force of it. She tried to set her feet and resume her guard. Too slow. He hammered her saber out of the way and bit into her skin, a burning gash along the left side of her chest. One of her Mind copies drew his attention before he could drive the blade deeper, surprising him as she rolled away, feeling the wet run of blood inside her coat.
He set his feet for another attack, too fast for her to follow without her Body. Her undamaged right arm hefted her saber a heartbeat too slow. This was death, come for her at last. She met it with jaw clenched, the tang of blood at the back of her throat, bringing her blade up for a riposte she knew would never connect.
A flash of light blinded her, and she felt the weight of his steel, turned aside.
White energy flared around her attacker, and he staggered back, light spilling from his eye sockets as Need connected him to someone else, far away. Paendurion. Her enemy.
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