So she stayed. And she answered every message with the same words: “Hold the line.”
Robert’s words. The only message he had left her. It made sense. If the line fell—at the left, the right, or the center—then there would be nothing left. A path would be made, and the enemy would sweep through to engulf them all.
She saw that much.
Valerian—silent and wild-eyed—had emerged from the trees and dismounted beside her. He told her nothing about what had transpired in the forest, and she did not ask. Did not need to ask in order to understand that he considered himself relieved of command. She had nothing to say about that decision. It had not been her choice; it had been Valerian’s. And he chose not to contradict her repetitive messages.
So she continued to say them.
To the couriers who continued to arrive, always bringing another version of their own message. We can’t break through. Trapped. Blocked. The path is blocked. We’re fighting, but no progress. No progress.
And no messages from the left. None. From Robert.
What was happening? Was he dead? Was the enemy going to sweep around on that side?
She hated being blind!
And then she realized she could send her own messenger. Maybe not to Robert. She had no idea where he was or if he was still alive. But she could send someone to investigate the status of the left flank.
She pulled up to a guardsman, pointed at the relevant side of the forest, and gave the order. “Find out what is happening to the forces on the left!”
He lifted his reins.
“And come back!” she shouted after him.
Which, of course, was inane. If he died, how would she know?
We should have discussed this.
We should have discussed all of this.
But maybe chaos defined battle. Her father had told her once that military strategy was a misnomer. Invented by scholars after each battle had taken place. Perhaps he had been correct. Though he had never engaged in war. Her father had believed in numbers, in letting his neighbors see he was prepared, but he had never employed his army in more than a minor skirmish. Had avoided conflict. And left this fight for her.
Again the Oracle’s courier arrived; this time his message was different. “We hold. The line is thin, but we hold.”
She nodded. The line is held. And it was held ahead of her. No cannon had fired after that first explosion. The road remained clogged. She did not have to see to know there were still thousands of Fortress men backed up, unable to fight.
Which was …
Ludicrous.
The line was thin on the right, and who knew how thin on the left. Idiocy. This was her job—her role—not just to relay messages, but to see the whole battle. The fog that had haunted her vanished.
“Wait!” she ordered the desert courier. Movement shifted in her peripheral vision.
Moments later Lord Lester’s messenger rode into view. Not Thomas. Her stepfather’s acceptance of his men’s enlistment had not been that gracious.
The new courier began reeling off the same message as always about the road being blocked.
“Tell Lord Lester to spread out his men!” Aurelia burst out. “Send the back formations right and left. Support the other lines!”
The messenger whirled his mount.
And she turned to the desert courier. “Tell the Oracle more men are coming.”
The rider touched his forehead in acknowledgment, then spun back toward the trees.
Her gaze turned to the forest on her left. Was there even a line there to support? But there had to be. If there wasn’t, we would all be dead.
She clung to that thought. Refused to let her imagination spiral beyond that one, solitary fact. She would not think about what might be happening in that tangled, dark miasma. Would not think about him. Would not allow herself to picture him wounded, trapped, unable to escape as the fire burned over him. Please, Robert, please. Stay alive.
How could she have let him go out there without telling him how she felt? Curse it, she was an idiot. She had known—had known for years—that her heart could not exist without him. How could she not have known that was love?
If he died without knowing, she would hold the responsibility. She would never know if her words—her heart—could have made a difference. Could have given him the strength and will to survive. Please, Robert. Live.
A rider burst from the forest, his face coated in soot. Then his torso hunched over as he coughed. But she recognized his horse as that of the guardsman she had sent. “It’s moving,” the man said at last. “Through the fire.” He coughed again. “I didn’t reach the end, but the line is there. Only Tyralt knows how! And it’s moving.”
“Forward?” she asked.
“Swinging south. It should hit the road.”
“Ahead of Lord Lester?”
The man was nodding. “If you can send enough support. Men are fighting all along the hinge. I passed forces that were heading out. I can check on whether they’re holding.”
She nodded. “Yes!” Then shouted, “Let me know! Let me know if they need more help!”
And he was gone.
• • •
Survive; Robert cursed the simplicity of his own advice. He couldn’t bring in the line to defend the hinge. Couldn’t fold the men from his left behind those to his right. Not easily. Not fast. If he yanked, the line would break, and defeat would swallow them all.
His gut said they would die anyway. He raised his whistle to his lips.
Then stopped. Men were pouring out of the trees. Not from the left, from the right. He recognized the garb of Lord Lester’s forces. Lining up. Row after row to support his own. A rider came straight toward Horizon. “We’ll hold the hinge!” the man shouted. “Just bring your men around to the road. Bring them around!”
Robert nodded, clasping the man’s elbow. “Tell His Lordship we’re coming.”
He gathered Horizon’s reins and swept back out along the line. This time there was no fire. No smoke.
We’re close, Robert thought. We must be close.
He could hear the evidence: more fighting and shouts from the men behind him. Not fear. Maybe anticipation. Horizon reached the end.
Then Robert could see the road through the trees. The ranks of royal soldiers. And he was not the only man who could see them.
A scream of a thousand whistles shrilled at his side. The Valshone signal of attack.
And beyond that signal, a high-pitched pealing. The royal army’s bugle. Shrieking retreat.
Horizon broke out of the trees into a flood of running soldiers. Wagons floated like barges, no one driving them. Teams panicked and tried to run, their cargo snagged by other wagons. Crates, weapons, ammunition—all tumbled into the current.
The Valshone courier at Robert’s side raised his musket to aim into the chaos.
Robert clasped the man’s shoulder. “They’re running!” he shouted. “Let them!”
The courier stared at him. “And allow the enemy to fight again?”
But they would anyway. Whatever advance force had been sent into this fight, there were thousands more to face. They aren’t the enemy. “A trapped man has no choice but to kill.”
The courier held his weapon in check, then relayed the message down the line. Muskets pulled back as though Robert had given an order. His men stood at the edge of the road.
They watched the royal army run.
And die. Lord Lester’s forces, wielding bayonets, arrived on the heels of the runners. But the block of wagons, combined with what appeared to be sheer exhaustion, slowed the chase. Enough for Robert to remember he still held the power of command in the tool at his throat.
He raised the whistle to his lips and blew the signal to halt. Around him, voices raised. Cheers, he realized numbly. For victory.
He closed his eyes and looked backward down the road. How far had they come? A mile? Two?
And how many countrymen had died in that stretch?
r />
Chapter Fifteen
GRAVEYARD
The cheers clashed within Aurelia as she rode into the melee. Men shouted with triumph over their defeat of the “enemy.” She could not think of the members of the royal army as her foe. But what right did she have to contradict men who had seen their comrades die? Blood covered the road. The red liquid soaked the earth around lifeless bodies and spattered the faces of the living.
The corpses now were so numerous that she could no longer ride. Aurelia dismounted, relinquishing Falcon’s reins into the hands of the guardsman who had brought her news from the left. And of the victory. But none of Robert.
“Aurelia.” Her name came from a blood-soaked form near her feet. And her heart staggered at the sight of a frontiersman’s wadded hide jacket pressed to a lethal chest wound. She dropped to her knees and met the wounded stranger’s eyes. Did he have children counting the days without him? Family who would count forever? Had his wife clutched his hand and begged him not to fight? Or closed her eyes and pled for his return?
Aurelia held her palm to the man’s gray cheekbone.
There was nothing she could offer him beyond her deepest gratitude. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for defending all of us.”
For a moment, his eyes held clear.
Then they turned glassy. His breath remained, but she knew he could no longer sense her presence.
Her name came again. From another wounded man. And another.
She rose slowly from the man who had lost consciousness. “Watch over him,” she asked of the guardsman holding her mare’s reins. “And Falcon.”
Then Aurelia went on alone. To answer the cries. As many as she could reach. She could do nothing for the dead or unconscious or those in so much pain they could not recognize her. She could offer the rest only her gratitude. Her touch. Her time.
She saw Robert in all of them. If he had survived without injury, he should be on this road. If he had died, she might never find him. Every wound seared a new image within her grim imagination. Every powder burn, every bayonet slash, every mangled limb.
The cannon had blown apart. The muzzle gone. She staggered at the sight of a severed arm draped across a priming rod. Torn bodies blocked the road, victims of the weapon she had agreed to have hauled across the Gate. Her stomach turned over, and she wretched, though it had been so long since she had eaten that nothing spilled from her throat.
She had done this. Had led these men here. Had convinced them their lives were worth less than a vision.
The call of her name came again, from a body she had thought was a corpse. A figure was stretched out beside an ammunition cart. Blood soaked the man’s garments from his throat to his boots. Fragments of iron embedded his legs. Other cannon shards lay on the earth beside him, plucked, she realized, from his chest.
Again he spoke her name, and she forced her gaze away from the wounds. To his face.
“Thomas?” she gasped, recognizing the bone structure beneath his gray pallor.
“Promise,” he said.
And she nodded, dropping to her knees. She would promise whatever he asked. If he wanted her to say she would win, she would lie. She would make that guarantee. I will have to write to Daria. If he wanted to tell his wife he regretted his choice to fight, that was what would be written. How could he not regret it?
His lips moved without sound.
“Yes?” Aurelia whispered. She had no knowledge of why Thomas had been close to the cannon. Perhaps it was only fate. But she knew he had risked his life to spy at the palace. That he had won her best friend’s heart. And he had collected the enlistment at the Fortress. Aurelia suspected she owed him more than she could fathom.
“Promise,” he said, “that you won’t trade our liberty for peace.”
“I promise.”
His eyes closed. And he died, the thin strand of life gone. She did not need to press her fingers to his pulse or hold her ear to his lips to know.
Death. It always won. She could not fight hard enough, ever, to defeat it. Her mind lurched back to the first death that had conquered her. Her brother’s. She had been only three, but she remembered James laughing down at her from his perch on the back of a horse. He had told her she could not come, that she was too young to ride, but that he would bring her back a trophy from the hunt. Except he had never returned. She had never seen him again outside his coffin.
And all the other more recent deaths: her horse, Bianca, slain on the night Aurelia’s tent had been burned to the ground; her father, whose death had been blamed on Aurelia; her mother, who had died without the kingdom’s recognition. As had Robert’s parents. And the people of the desert, the frontier, and on this road. I will not allow them to have died for nothing.
Her name came again.
A pair of Valshone soldiers stood above her. “We’re under orders,” said one, “to move the dead to the left side of the roadway.”
Her chest ached. The sky had gone gray with smoke and shadow. Her gaze dropped again to the body beside her, but it was not Thomas who filled her thoughts now. She had allowed her mind to dwell on every death except the one she feared most. Why was she here on this road and not in the forest? Combing through vines and branches and smoldering ash and searching for the one person in this entire world without whom … without …
What would she do if he was dead? What would she tell her heart? How would she live?
“And to carry the wounded to the right,” the voice above her continued, yanking her back to reality. Because she would do this, her chest told her. What she had been doing since she had first set out along this artery of death. She would wall off her own hurt and worry about everyone else.
If the wounded were on the right side of the road, that was where she belonged.
Slowly she rose. Her legs had cramped. She had to prop her weight against the ammunition cart. Her voice wavered. “Whose orders?”
“General Vantauge.”
Robert. Emotion flooded her body. Relief. Pain. Joy. Her breath came in gasps. And now the tears. Release.
He lived.
Her entire body was trembling. Was this how he had felt every time he had told her he wanted her to be safe? That he needed her safe? She did not know how words would ever serve justice to the way she felt right now, but he was not going to die without hearing them. “Where?” Her voice returned at last. “Where is he?”
The two Valshone had moved on.
And the wounded remained. Her instincts pushed at her to run down the road. To call Robert’s name and keep running and shouting until she reached him. Until she could hold him within her arms and feel the beating of his heart against hers. But these men, their hearts might already be stopping.
She returned to the injured, crouching beside them. The numbers were overwhelming. Men from the Fortress, but also men in royal army uniforms—soldiers who reached to touch her face as though they thought she was an illusion and who tried to apologize, to swear her their fealty and ask for forgiveness.
What had these men been told? Where was the rest of the royal army? What awaited her in Tyralt City? She squelched the questions that burned in her throat. Instead she tried to offer solace. This was no time for interrogation. And clearly these royal soldiers knew little more than the fact that they had been marched north.
There were medics now—men whose hands pressed bandages to wounds. Men who peeled back cloth and wielded metal tools that reached into flesh to remove bullets. Men who, more often than not, assessed injuries, then frowned. And withdrew.
Stories had begun to spread, fragments at first. Disjointed. The tellers’ voices often faltered in her presence. Aurelia caught only phrases, then a pattern.
“He rode into the flames.”
“He came out of the flames.”
“He brought us through the flames.”
“General Vantauge.”
The men were talking about Robert! She struggled to catch more words. Then slowly she began to grasp
what he had done. That he had taken over Valerian’s command, reformed the line, ridden that line, and brought the men through the fire and around to the road. Which had resulted in panic and flight from the royal army.
“He says we’ll comb the woods.”
“He has a guard on the captured wagons.”
“He wants us to help separate the wounded from the dead.”
The voices now came from behind her and not the injured. These comments were no longer stories, she realized, but orders given after the battle. Perhaps recently.
Her gaze turned to sweep the roadway. The center swelled with standing men. A line. She could not tell its purpose. Did not care. Knew only that she must see beyond. She stepped carefully around the wounded, to the edge and peered down the road.
A barricade of wrecked wagons and a row of guardsmen blocked the route. And before those wagons, less than a hundred feet ahead, stood a bay stallion.
Her heart pounded.
The road itself was too full. She had no hope of parting that swelled line. Instead she ducked into the trees, fought the underbrush, and crossed the remaining distance.
To witness the man who had tethered that stallion with naught but loyalty.
There was blood on Robert’s face and shirt, but his erect posture gave no indication that the blood was his own. She wanted to burst onto the road, fling her arms around his neck and yell at him for failing to send her word of his survival. To bury her face in his chest and hold him forever. To tell him she loved him. That she had been a coward and a fool and a scared child afraid to read her own heart.
But he had not seen her. He was speaking to someone else.
Then someone else.
And someone else.
They were all waiting for him. The entire line.
And she realized that this moment was not about her or Robert. But about these men who had just risked everything for Tyralt. And about the gratitude she owed them. General Vantauge. They had named him. If she really believed in freedom, if she believed the people had the right to choose their own leaders, then she must begin with the man who meant the most to her. And to these men.