He understood the lure of testing one’s bravery one-on-one against a worthy opponent.
But he couldn’t do that, as much as he wanted it, as much as his own blood boiled at the taunts this man hurled at him.
As Iosa reached the center of the line once more, the bowstrings of the Mundoan archers sang percussively as a flock of arrows rose. Iosa’s driver raised his shield, and Iosa took up his own as the barrage fell. The majority of them fell just short of or behind the moving chariot, but many struck the shields, the wooden rails, and the chariot’s floor.
Iosa howled with derisive laughter, flinging down his shield. “Then cower away, Savas! Stay behind your men and let them die uselessly for you. We’ll force you to fight in the end! We are coming for you! Your doom is already set.” With that, his driver turned the chariot hard, and the horses galloped away up the hill toward the misty ridge. The wan sun shone on the ceannàrd’s arrow-feathered shield sitting mockingly near the line of stakes atop the trampled, rain-slick grass.
Altan knew that the grass would soon become a field of bloodstained mud, littered with bodies and fallen weapons.
He hoped that most of those bodies would be Cateni, but he feared that wouldn’t be the case.
Maol was grinning when he arrived back at the ridge. “They’re soaked and miserable and as cowardly as ever,” he told Voada and the others gathered there. “You should have seen the terror in the eyes of their front line as I rode up and down in front of them. It’s time. Ceanndraoi, will you ride with me again?”
Voada nodded. She went to his chariot, and he extended his hand to pull her up. “And our attack formation?” Àrd Mac Tsagairt asked Maol. Magaidh was already in her husband’s chariot, lashing herself to the rails.
“Let the draoi who wish to do so ride with the chariots and prepare their spells as we ride down,” Maol answered. “We’ll need spells to clear the stakes they’ve placed against our chariots and mounted warriors. Once those are gone, we’ll have the archers send in a volley, and we’ll follow behind to charge frontally: first the chariots and cavalry, then those on foot. Their line will break quickly,” he said confidently, “and we need to be prepared to face their own chariots and cavalry. Savas has set them to either side, waiting. This battle will be over by the time the sun is overhead.”
“Let me first talk to our people,” Voada told Maol. “Hùisdean,” she said to the driver, “hold here a moment.”
Voada turned and faced the Cateni troops gathered on the ridgeline. She let her gaze travel over them: men and women alike, all clutching their weapons, clad in whatever armor they had or had recovered from the fallen. At the very summit of the ridge, just beyond the massed warriors, the wagons had been set with wheels chocked, the horses unhooked from their yokes so that the Cateni could ride them into battle. The faces of children and the elderly peered out from the wagons.
Voada let her anamacha slip into her. The Moonshadow remained silent and hidden; she found Iomhar easily and took the energy he offered, using it to carry her voice to the gathered warriors.
“This,” she said, her voice echoing, “is not the first time that the Cateni have been led into battle by a woman. But I didn’t come to boast of a long line of ancestry, nor to recover a kingdom or the plundered wealth of my family. I take to the field like the least among you: to press the cause of liberty, to avenge the fact that our freedom was taken from us, and to avenge my own scourged and lost family. Pride and arrogance are all that are sacred to the Mundoa. In their minds, all Cateni are subject to violation; old and young alike endure the lash of slavery, and our virgins are deflowered. But Elia’s day—and that of all Her children—is now at hand.
“A Mundoan army dares to await us just below.” Voada pointed down the slope to where they could just make out the line of the Mundoan army in the fading mist, in the growing sunlight. “They will pay for their rashness with their lives. Those few of them who will survive the carnage of this day, who are now cowering, poorly hidden behind their entrenchments, are thinking of nothing but how to save themselves with ignominious, cowardly flight. From the din of our preparations and the shouts that you will send toward them in just a few breaths, the Mundoa will shrink back with terror. Look around you and view our numbers. Behold our proud display of warlike spirit. Consider why each of you has come here to draw your avenging sword. On this spot, here and now, we must either conquer or die with glory. There is no alternative. My resolution is fixed: I will go down now to meet them. The rest of you, if you please, may leave now and live in bondage, or you can ride with me for Elia and Cateni. What do you say?”
A great shout erupted from the massed throats of the army. Maol answered as well, his voice sounding thin next to the memory of Voada’s. “We fight for Elia and the Cateni,” he cried, and they echoed the line back to him, so loudly that Voada felt the impact in her chest.
“For Elia and the Cateni!”
Even the souls captured in her anamacha echoed the shout. Even the Moonshadow. Especially the Moonshadow.
“Now!” Voada roared. And with that, the army surged down the ridge toward the waiting Mundoa.
The Mundoa heard them coming before they saw them: a cacophony louder than the fierce thunderstorms of the night before. A shrieking, howling monster was descending from the ridge, dark and huge and multi-armed, resolving slowly into a many-bodied creature spreading out over the fields to either side of Stormwind Road. Altan, in his chariot atop a small hill behind the front lines, could see the Mundoan ranks visibly shudder in response to seeing the onrushing, clamorous wave of the assault. “Hold!” he cried to them. “Hold! Bannermen, alert the archers!”
Flags began to wave around Altan in response, but well before the Cateni line reached the range of the archers, the draoi launched their initial spells. From the lead chariot rushing down the Stormwind Road in the middle of their formation—Ceannàrd Iosa’s chariot, Altan was fairly certain, with Ceanndraoi Voada riding with him—a huge gout of fire went hurtling ahead, slamming first into the field of stakes so that the wood erupted and turned to ash, then tumbling forward into the lines of infantry beyond. Screams and cries filled the air from those burned and injured; the dead simply fell. Altan saw a terrible, huge hole open in the first phalanx. Officers shouted for reinforcements to move forward into the gap, but the soldiers had to climb over the smoking dead and wounded to replace the line, and they were slow to move.
Other spells followed: at least a hand more, though none as powerful or as destructive as the ceanndraoi’s. The Mundoan lines were shifting uneasily, their discipline falling away, and Altan shouted at them even as he heard Musa’s roar ordering them to reform their ranks. Another spell erupted from Iosa’s chariot as it approached the range of the archers. A swarm of arrows filled the air, but an unnatural wind hurled them back, and Mundoan shields snapped up as the deadly rain from their own weapons turned against them.
With a gut-wrenching sound of horses, swords, javelins, and armor all crashing together, the Cateni line slammed into the Mundoan phalanxes with a shock that rippled all the way back to Altan, the horses of his chariot rearing up even as Tolga tried desperately to regain control of them. “Cavalry!” Altan shouted to his bannermen, and they waved their flags to signal the chariots and mounted warriors on either side of the formation to begin their own attacks, closing in like a pincer on the crowded, narrowing field of battle.
In descriptions of war that Altan had heard from the poets and orators, the great battles between large armies always seemed clean and ordered. It sounded as if the commanders moved their phalanxes and cohorts like pieces in the Cateni game called fidhcheall, in which the figures of warriors, druids, forts, and chariots slid about on a checkered board, trying to surround and capture the enemy emperor.
That description was entirely unlike any battle Altan had ever experienced. Battles—no matter how carefully the commander had choreographed the expected movements, feints, and charges beforehand—were noisy, chaotic, a
nd messy affairs, and even the commander on a hill behind his army couldn’t see the overall picture, only small flashes of it. The view became worse when one was an active part of the battle; the world constricted to the soldiers in front of you, who were doing their best to kill you as you attempted to kill them. There was no overall sense of whether the battle was going well or ill. Everything came down to simple individual survival, not a grand victory or inglorious defeat.
The song of victory or defeat was left to the poets to compose afterward.
From the hill, Altan could only glimpse tiny figures struggling against each other, his view increasingly obscured by the smoky remnants of draoi and sihirki spells that drifted over the field. He could hear the faint clash of metal and the shouts and screams of Mundoan soldiers and Cateni warriors. On one side of the field, Musa’s banner flew, but Altan could see that the sub-commander was surrounded by the enemy and fighting for his very life.
Runners came hurrying up the field toward him, bearing snippets of news. Altan found himself increasingly restless. Below him, the hole that the Cateni had torn into the center of his forces widened into a gaping chasm as the enemy continued to push forward. The cavalry advance from the sides of the field was being held back by the crush of Cateni warriors on foot, wielding lances and pikes to tear the riders from their mounts or chariots and to impale onrushing warhorses. The sihirki, for all their clamoring, were useless against the far more effective and quicker spells of the Cateni draoi.
Altan didn’t like what he saw, and the reports continued to become more dire and urgent.
“Commander?” Tolga asked, looking back over his shoulder, the muscles in his arms standing out from the effort of holding the warhorses. Altan wanted to tell him to charge into the fray, to take him down to meet Ceannàrd Maol Iosa and Ceanndraoi Voada, to cleanse his unease with blood and fury. But he shook his head. He wondered how much longer he could allow this to go on before he must have the bannermen signal retreat, have those who still lived fall back to Siran and let the Cateni claim the field.
We can’t stay here much longer. This is already too costly. We’ve lost …
“Hold,” Altan told Tolga. “Not yet. Wait …”
Wait … Altan hated the word even as he spoke it. He gripped the hilt of his sword, half pulling it from the scabbard.
Maol and Hùisdean drove Voada into the midst of the battle as she tried to cling to her outer vision against the wild storm of the anamacha’s world.
The Moonshadow’s massed voice shrieked in her ears, and her energy burned Voada as if she had swallowed the very sun. She made desperate patterns in the air to contain the power, her voice torn and hoarse as she chanted the words of the spells the Moonshadow fed her. She had to release the power quickly lest it consume her.
Voada was a bright, fiery, giant’s sword, laying waste to the Mundoan soldiers around them, their dying cries faint against the tempest raging inside her. Even Maol had paused, lance in his hand, glancing back at her with awe as his chariot bucked and lurched over the ground, hooves and wheels pounding Mundoan dead into the earth. Her spells were weapons that scythed through the enemy, clearing a path before them, leading them ever deeper into the Mundoan ranks. They were past the first phalanx already, tearing into the reserves behind them, and through the bloody vision overlaying her eyes, Voada could see the hill where Savas waited with his banners.
This was unlike the few other times she’d been in battle as a draoi. Then she’d been in control; she’d taken time with each spell and crafted it as needed. Not now. What flooded into her from her anamacha was unfettered madness and fury and rage as Leagsaidh Moonshadow stepped fully from the shadows. The Moonshadow controlled her now, and Voada was simply a vessel through which that vast power flowed.
A vessel that was cracking and failing under the intense pressure of containing that force.
She couldn’t do this much longer. The toll on her body was too great, and exhaustion threatened to send her pinwheeling, lost and terrified, entirely into the world of the anamacha. “Maol!” she called even as she felt the urge to release another spell, as demanding as the urge to push during childbirth. “I can’t keep this up … I have to …”
From her hands, she disgorged another fireball that went careening over Hùisdean and the flattened ears of their horses, erupting as it reached the soldiers who were scrambling and fleeing away from them. Voada hung limply from the ropes holding her upright. She fought to stay conscious, fought to thrust the anamacha of the Moonshadow out of her, but she couldn’t push the specter from her.
“Rest, Voada,” Maol Iosa shouted, his voice nearly lost against the interior din. “You’ve done enough.”
“Leave me!” she shouted to the Moonshadow’s voice. She was sweating, her hair damp and darkened with it, and a fever burned within her. Her eyes wanted to roll back in her head. She clutched at the silver oak leaf around her neck as if it alone could hold her sanity. The real world was growing dim around her, and only Magh da Chèo seemed real to her; she could barely hear the screams of the wounded, the shouts of the warriors as they hewed down the Mundoa.
“No!” she shouted at that, and Maol jerked around to look at her.
“Ceanndraoi?” His voice was alarmed, but she couldn’t find his face in her vision. Instead, the shapes of long-dead draoi were huddled around her, crowding her. She pushed them aside, but it was like swimming in mud. There was a glimpse of sunlight ahead of her, and in it were the sounds of battle. She lunged toward it desperately in her mind and found herself back in the living world again with the anamacha outside her for the moment. She gasped for air, her body wracked. She knew she shouldn’t take them into her again, but she also knew that she must.
She must.
“I’ll take you back to the wagons,” Maol was saying, as if he heard her desperation, but she shook her head.
“No. You can’t. We stay.” The short bursts of words were all she could manage. “Win this,” she told him. “Finish it.”
Maol stared at her, then nodded. He plucked another spear from the rail and bellowed a challenge, shaking the spear toward the hill where they could see Savas’ banner. “We’re coming for you, Commander!” Maol Iosa bellowed. “You can’t escape me! Hùisdean, forward!”
The chariot bucked as Hùisdean shouted commands to the horses from the traces. Àrd Mac Tsagairt’s chariot carrying Magaidh turned to follow them, as did several mounted warriors and those on foot. They plunged into the opening Voada had created even as it threatened to close, pushing deep into the Mundoan lines. Soldiers before them either fled or were run down.
“They’re ours!” Maol crowed. “Look at them running!”
At Voada and Maol Iosa’s backs, they could hear horns blowing.
The lines were broken, and the Cateni kept coming: an endless, shrieking horde. Altan saw the phalanxes shiver and break, and heard the officers shouting at the men to “Hold! Hold!” Tolga was craning his head back over his shoulder, expecting Altan to enter the fray himself.
Retreat. We must retreat. This battle is lost.
Below him, Altan could see Iosa’s chariot carrying the ceanndr
aoi, and he witnessed the terrible toll that the woman was taking with her spells. Nothing and no one was able to touch her. Iosa’s war chariot moved in an untouchable bubble rimmed with fire and carpeted with Mundoan bodies and blood. More Cateni flowed into the gap the woman had made, all the way through the phalanxes and nearly to the bottom of the hill on which Altan stood watching. As the witch-woman sagged in exhaustion from her efforts, Iosa ripped a spear from the chariot and brandished it toward Altan. He shouted; Altan couldn’t make out the words, but the challenge was obvious. Tolga recognized it as well, and again he glanced back at Altan.
It was what Altan wanted as well; it wasn’t his preference to lead from behind. But he had another duty as commander: to tell his men to fall back, to save as many of them as he could so that they could fight another day.
As he opened his mouth to give the command, though, there was a blaring of horns from well up the slope and from the woods to the south, and the banners of Ilkur’s cohorts emerged from the cover of the trees. Ilkur’s cavalry came flowing out, lances held low, and slammed into the rear flank of the Cateni. These were the least trained of the Cateni, mostly young men and a few women who had left home to be with Voada’s army, and Ilkur’s soldiers sliced into them like a well-honed axe into a decaying tree trunk. Altan could see the immediate response from his troops as they noticed Ilkur’s arrival. The Mundoan phalanxes rallied; the lines stiffened, the soldiers shouted with a new defiance and energy, and Altan’s horns answered those of Ilkur. As for the Cateni, the spells of the draoi, whose deadly power had won the initial skirmishes, faltered as the spellcasters looked behind them. The Cateni war chariots, which had been about to storm the hill where Altan stood, halted to look behind.
Altan could sense the shift in the battle. “Now!” he shouted to Tolga, to the bannermen. “Send everyone forward. Now!” He pulled a spear from the railing of his chariot, holding it aloft. “Tolga, to Maol Iosa!” he roared.
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