“Lucky? I thought it would be preferable to be taken prisoner.”
He gave her a skeptical look. “Of course.”
If we survive, he’ll be sent to a Kez workhouse. And I’ll be passed around the infantry until I’m sent to a workhouse as well. Unless an officer catches me first. Then I’ll be at his mercy, little more than a slave.
Was that preferable to being killed outright?
Adamat climbed to his feet. The Wings’ field artillery had begun to fire, and even at a quarter mile, the sound shook Nila. She remembered the fighting in Adopest between Tamas’s men and the royalists and the countless sleepless nights she’d had after escaping. This was going to be so much worse.
“The sound gets to me, too,” Adamat said. “Infantrymen might get used to it, but we’re just civilians. Artillery is terrifying.”
“Like Privileged.”
“Yes. Like Privileged.” He examined her out of the corner of his eye.
Nila pretended not to notice. Yes, she wanted to say, I am a Privileged. But I can’t do anything yet.
A distant sound caught Nila’s ear. It was hard to hear beneath the report of the artillery fire, but she knew it immediately when she turned toward the Kez lines. It was the rat-tat-tat of snare drums. The Kez columns, infantry in their tens of thousands, were advancing.
The lump in Nila’s throat felt like she had swallowed a carriage. She’d never been this terrified, not even beneath Vetas’s threats.
She wondered if Jakob was getting along well with Adamat’s children. He was a good boy, still far too young to manage on his own. “Will Faye take care of Jakob after I die?” she asked.
“You won’t die,” Adamat said halfheartedly. After a pause, he added, “She’s not the type to turn out a child.”
Nila gave a soft sigh of relief. “I didn’t think so, but I don’t know her all that well.”
Several moments passed as they watched the Kez continue to advance into the onslaught of artillery fire. “How the bloody pit did I end up here?” Adamat muttered.
Nila didn’t think it was meant to be heard. What was going on in the old inspector’s head? Was he thinking of his children? Or was he trying to think of a way out? Nila knew that’s how she should have been thinking. She glanced toward the lazy fields to their northwest. Maybe she could run for it. Hide in some farmer’s wheat field until nightfall and then strike out toward Adopest.
It was worth a shot. Wasn’t it?
The sight of something moving out there on the plains killed her hasty plans.
“There are soldiers out there,” Nila said. Adamat turned and gazed toward the northwest for a few moments, squinting.
“Cavalry.” He spit in the dirt and turned toward the closest Wings officer, but it was plain they had already spotted the enemy. A ripple of panic went up among the brigade guarding the camp, and officers had to shout to drown it out.
Adran cavalry. Nila had no idea of their number, but they took her breath away. There must have been thousands. Breastplates glittered in the sun and their Adran-blue jackets and red-striped pants stood out against the tan fields of grain. They must have circled around far to the north and were now blocking the only avenue of retreat.
A Wings colonel sent a messenger running for the front lines. The colonel’s face was pale and she gripped her belt with white-knuckled intensity.
Adamat gave a resigned sigh. “I guess that was predictable,” he said. “Looks like at least three battalions of cuirassiers.”
“Cuirassiers?”
“Heavy cavalry. You can tell by the breastplate. Adran cuirassiers armor their horses as well.” Adamat pointed to the Wings’ infantry as they fell into lines behind the waist-high breastworks that were their only defense. “They’ll break a thin bayonet line like this one without too much problem.”
Adamat headed closer to the rear of the camp, where the Wings’ infantry were preparing to make their stand. Nila hesitated for a moment and then followed him.
The Wings’ colonel gave him a glance as he approached. “Civilians should keep away from the front,” she said.
“The front is that way,” Adamat said, pointing behind him.
“Tighten up your men, Cronier,” the colonel shouted. “If a single man runs, I’ll gut him myself!” She looked at Adamat and Nila once more but refrained from commenting.
The Adran cuirassiers drew closer. They were taking their time and it wasn’t until they stopped some half mile away that Nila realized they were likely waiting for a signal from General Hilanska. They would charge the rear right as the Kez charged the front.
Looking back to the south, she noted that the Kez were still advancing at a slow, methodical rate. The Wings’ artillery left scars throughout their ranks, but it seemed to have no more effect than would scratching a giant. They just kept coming on.
On the hill to their northeast, General Hilanska’s infantry suddenly surged forward, advancing at a pace just faster than the Kez.
To the northwest, some three thousand cuirassiers began to advance at a trot.
It seemed to Nila as if she could see her death advancing across those fields. The cuirassiers were really rather splendid, if she considered them without regard to her life. They moved in perfect coordination, the plumes on their horses’ heads and the feathers in their steel helmets blowing with the breeze. She wondered if the ground really was shaking, or if it was just her imagination.
“Over there,” Adamat said, his voice coming out a dry croak, “to the west. Looks like a battalion of Adran lancers.”
She knew that term. More cavalry. Lightly armed.
“They’ll swing around and hit our front lines from the west,” the Wings’ colonel said. She immediately dispatched another messenger to the front, just as the first messenger returned.
The messenger saluted. “Brigadier Abrax orders you to hold your fire.”
“Hold my—” The colonel’s face turned red. “Hold my fire? What the pit is that supposed to mean? Those cuirassiers will crush us!” She sent the messenger back to the front and fumed silently.
Nila tore her gaze away from the advancing cuirassiers. To the northwest, the Adran artillery batteries suddenly belched flame and smoke, their barrels pointed toward the Wings’ encampment. Nila squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the terrible whistling of cannon fire at the royalist barricades, and waited for the horrible sound.
It never came. When she opened her eyes again, she could see the distant figures of the Adran artillerymen busy reloading. “What are they aiming for?” she asked.
Adamat frowned. “I don’t know.”
Another salvo followed, and Nila strained to see where the cannonballs were landing. The artillery seemed pointed straight at her. She had no idea how far a cannon would fire, but why would they fire at all unless they were going to hit something?
“I don’t think they’re firing at anything,” the Wings’ colonel suddenly said. She sounded surprised by her own outburst. “There’s no chance they would overshoot us at that range and…” She fell silent as more of the Adran cannons opened fire.
Nila twisted her head. Was that the sound of muskets? To the south, a low cloud of black smoke hung over the battlefield, and she heard a sudden roar: a hundred thousand voices as the Kez lines charged.
The battle had begun.
It would end soon enough for her. The cuirassiers were still advancing at a trot, but they would charge momentarily. They couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards away. She looked down at her right hand and tried to will the fire to come. She had to go down fighting. She couldn’t let herself be killed like a commoner. Not now. Not after everything she’d been through.
Her hand began to feel warm, but nothing happened. She concentrated harder. Bo had said she was powerful. Surely she could do something. Anything!
A cry went up among the Wings’ infantry, and Nila looked up, her concentration broken, to see that the cuirassiers had suddenly changed direction. The whole g
roup had turned west. The Wings’ colonel watched with mouth agape as the cuirassiers trotted parallel to the Wings’ line, just out of rifle range. The Wings’ colonel barked orders, shifting her men to protect that side of the camp.
The Adran cuirassiers continued on, swinging wide of the camp and then even wider of the Wings’ front lines.
Nila didn’t understand. Were they going to flank the Wings’ front line? Then what about the lancers that Adamat had seen? Where the pit were all these cavalry going?
She didn’t understand until she caught sight of the Adran artillery. Their crews had stopped firing over the Wings’ camp and had readjusted to face south, toward the Kez lines. General Hilanska’s Adran infantry swiveled along with the artillery, moving forward to take up positions not against the Kez front, but beside it.
A messenger on horseback arrived at full gallop and reined in beside the Wings’ colonel.
“Orders from Brigadier Abrax!” the messenger gasped. “Swing your men around and prepare to act as auxiliary to the front lines. The Adran attack was a ruse. General Hilanska is no longer in command of the Adran army and they will fight on our side!”
The colonel gave orders to a nearby captain and then grabbed the messenger’s horse by the bridle. “Who the pit is in charge, then?”
“Why, Field Marshal Tamas. He has returned.”
Nila swayed on her feet, feeling suddenly weak. Tamas was still alive? And he was in command? Maybe, just maybe, she would survive this day.
“Nila,” Adamat said kindly, “your arm is on fire.”
She looked down to find a blue nimbus of flame surrounding her right hand and engulfing her arm to the elbow. She waved her arm to put it out, and then, experimentally, she touched her thumb and forefinger together. The flame sprang back up around her fist.
To the south, an audible crash rose above the artillery and musket fire, and she looked to see that three battalions of Adran cuirassiers had just slammed into the Kez flank.
CHAPTER
15
Adamat couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. Field Marshal Tamas wasn’t merely alive, he was here?
Tamas must have taken the command from Hilanska. That meant that the Adran forces, including the Wings of Adom, could now present a unified front against the Kez.
Adamat’s heart fell as he dwelt upon that thought. The Kez still outnumbered Adro by at least four to one, and now that they battled on the open plains, it would be an easy thing for the Kez to spread their superior numbers and engulf the smaller Adran army.
The bulk of the battle was now hidden in the low cover of black musket smoke, obscuring the southern horizon as if an entire city were afire. To the southwest, Adamat could see the Adran cuirassiers struggling to disengage themselves after a successful charge at the Kez flank. Kez auxiliaries were already advancing at a double march to cut off the cuirassiers’ escape.
To Adamat’s horror, the auxiliaries continued to fan out, stretching impossibly far beyond the edge of the Wings’ lines. The Kez must have been expecting Hilanska to take care of the Wings’ flank, and now that the ruse had been betrayed, they had commanded several brigades forward to take care of the job.
And they would do so easily. Even if all those auxiliaries were untrained and unequipped, they more than made up for it in bulk. They would collapse the Wings’ right by sheer manpower.
Beside Adamat, Nila had taken to snapping her fingers, igniting her arm and then putting it out again with Privileged sorcery. She had stopped watching the battle and seemed completely enthralled in her own experimentation. He noticed that the Wings’ colonel had taken a long step away from her, and he did the same. Nila—by her own admission—didn’t have any idea what she was doing, and Adamat didn’t care to find out how many charred corpses it took for most Privileged to figure it out.
The Adran cuirassiers finally pulled themselves away from the Kez flank and fled before the advancing auxiliaries. They had left an enormous dent in the side of the Kez infantry, but their own numbers had suffered, and they retreated to the northwest to lick their wounds.
The auxiliaries slowed when they realized they would not catch the cuirassiers and swung around to march against the Wings’ flank. Adamat, even with his unskilled eye, could see it would end in disaster. He hoped that Tamas was planning on sending more reinforcements to this side, because it couldn’t get much worse.
Adamat swore to himself under his breath. Why had he let that thought enter his head? Of course it could get worse.
It just had.
A brigade of Kez auxiliaries had just broken off from the main body and was marching straight for the camp. Another brigade soon followed, and Adamat realized that nothing but the Wings’ colonel and her one brigade of green troops stood between the camp and the Kez.
Even if they managed a strong defense, it would still be a slaughter. The Kez infantry wouldn’t turn away at the last moment. They would overrun the camp defenders, kill any followers, loot and burn the camp, and then turn to attack the Wings from behind.
The Wings’ colonel gave a rapid succession of orders. Messengers sprinted toward the front, and the companies wheeled from the north to face this new threat.
Adamat drew his cane sword and clutched it tightly in one hand. He immediately felt silly. What would a cane sword do against musketmen with bayonets fixed? He thought to ask the colonel if there was a spare rifle he could use, but she dashed away suddenly, shouting orders at a nearby captain.
That left Adamat alone with Nila. The girl Privileged was still flicking her fingers, sparking blue flames along her arm.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Trying to get this to work,” she answered, not looking up. Another snap of the fingers and the blue flame erupted around her hand. She shook the flames out with a look of frustration.
“Do you think this is the best time for that?”
He noticed that Nila was paying close attention to where she positioned her fingers when she snapped them. Each new try she moved them slightly, and then attempted a quick combination of snaps, rubbing her thumb against first her forefinger, then her middle finger.
“I might not get another chance.”
“Well, look,” Adamat said. He knew what she was thinking. Make it work. Save everyone with her newfound sorcery. But of course she couldn’t learn to use her sorcery in just a few moments, and the very idea of the girl trying seemed incredibly absurd. As absurd as him standing here with his cane sword drawn. “We need to get as far toward the back of the camp as we can. Once the fighting starts, we could make a run for the Adran lines. Then we could… Ah!”
A jet of flame shot from Nila’s hand and traced a finger of blackened earth across the ground twenty paces away, nearly setting fire to a nearby corporal.
Nila gave a scream—half startled, half victorious. “I’ve got it!”
“What? You haven’t got it,” Adamat said. “Do you even know what you did?”
Nila held her off-hand away from herself gingerly, pointing toward an open patch of ground between two nearby tents. She brushed her thumb across her forefinger, then touched it gently to her pinkie. Flame erupted from her dominant hand—not a thin tendril this time, but a gout that seemed to spring up from the ground, setting fire to the grass and rising five or six feet in the air, traveling from her to the spot she’d pointed at as if following a line of lamp oil.
“All right,” Adamat said. “I’m impressed.” “Terrified” seemed a better word for it, but Adamat didn’t think the girl needed to hear that. She didn’t know what she was doing. Who knew what an untrained Privileged was capable of? She might be able to set fire to the entire enemy army, but could she keep from doing the same to her allies?
He wondered if he should head toward the Adran lines. If Tamas was back, Adamat would need to report everything that had happened over the last several months. But during a battle wouldn’t be the best time.
At least it might get him farther away
from the approaching Kez auxiliaries.
“Nila, we should…” He trailed off. The girl was gone. He cast about, then spotted her sprinting, skirts in hand, toward the Wings’ rearguard and the Kez auxiliaries beyond them.
What was she doing? She couldn’t possibly think she could help. She was just rushing off to get herself killed.
Adamat looked toward the Adran lines. He could make it. The Adran command tent was less than two miles away. He could get there and report to Tamas, and maybe manage to send some help this direction.
The girl wasn’t his responsibility. She was Bo’s, and Adamat owed Bo nothing.
With a curse, Adamat set off after Nila.
Nila shouldered her way through the line of soldiers preparing to defend the Wings’ camp and ignored their yells as she scrambled over the fortifications and ran toward the enemy brigade.
A little voice in the back of her head screamed at her to turn around and run the other way. What the pit was she doing? She was running straight to her death. Even if she could replicate the fire, she couldn’t possibly use it to destroy an entire brigade. She might take a few of them with her, but they’d gun her down and trample her body into the mud. She wasn’t going to do any good out there.
But she ignored the voice and kept heading toward the enemy.
The voice in her head changed tactics.
You’re going to try to kill people. These are human lives you’ll be ending. You’re not a warrior. You’re a laundress. They’ll die in an inferno, burned alive, and the screams will haunt you the rest of your life.
But, she argued, if I do nothing, then the Wings’ mercenaries will die. The infantry will be overwhelmed and all their noncombatants will be put to the sword.
That’s what they’re paid to do.
Nila slowed, no longer convinced she had the strength to do what was necessary. What would Bo say? Wouldn’t he tell her to stop being a coward and learn to act like a Privileged? Hadn’t he also said that courage was overrated? Contradictory bastard.
She suspected that in this situation he would tell her she was an untrained bloody fool about to get herself killed.