Dianora had stood on the hill watching them come. It seemed to take forever. She went away into their tent and then came back, several times. The sun began to set. It was over behind her in the west above the sea before Alberico’s mercenaries had all marched or ridden into the valley.
‘Three to one, perhaps a little better than that,’ Brandin had said, coming up beside her. His short greying hair was uncovered, ruffled by the late afternoon breeze.
‘Are they too many?’ she had asked, quietly so no one else would hear.
He looked at her quickly, then took her hand. He often did that now, as if unable to bear not having touched her for any length of time. Their love-making since the Dive had taken on an urgency that would leave them both shattered and drained afterwards, scarcely able to form thoughts of any kind. Which was at the centre of things for her, Dianora knew: she wanted to numb her mind, to still the voices and the memories. Obliterate the image of that clear, straight path disappearing in the darkness of the sea.
On the hill the day the Barbadians came Brandin laced his fingers through her own and said, ‘They may be too many. It is hard to judge. I am stronger in my power than Alberico in his. I think that on this hill I am worth the difference in the armies.’
Quietly spoken, a careful statement of relevant facts. No arrogance, only the steady, always enduring pride. And why should she doubt his sorcery? She knew exactly what it had done in war some twenty years ago.
That conversation had been yesterday. Afterwards she had turned to watch the sun go down into the sea. The night had been bright and glorious, with Vidomni waxing and Ilarion at her full, blue and mysterious, a moon of fantasy, of magic. She had wondered if they would have time to be alone that night, but in fact Brandin had been down on the plain among the tents of his army through most of the dark hours, and speaking with his captains after that. D’Eymon, she knew, was going to remain up here with him tomorrow, and Rhamanus—more a sailor than a military commander—would be on the hill as well to lead the men of the King’s Guard in defence, if matters came to that. If matters came to that they were probably dead, she knew.
Both moons had set by the time Brandin came back to their tent on that hill above the sea. Awake in bed, waiting, she could see his weariness. He had maps with him, sketches of terrain to study one last time, but she made him put them down.
He came over to the bed still fully clothed and lay down. After a moment he rested his head in her lap. Neither of them spoke for a long time. Then Brandin shifted a little and looked up at her.
‘I hate that man down there,’ he said quietly. ‘I hate everything he stands for. There is no passion in him, no love, no pride. Only ambition. Nothing matters but that. Nothing in the world can move him to pity or grief but his own fate. Everything is a tool, an instrument. He wants the Emperor’s Tiara, everyone knows it, but he doesn’t want it for anything. He only wants. I doubt anything in his life has ever moved him to feel anything for anyone else … love, loss, anything.’
He subsided. He was repeating himself in his exhaustion. She pressed her fingers against his temples, looking down at his face as he turned again and his eyes closed and his brow gradually grew smooth under her touch. Eventually his breathing steadied and she knew he was asleep. She stayed awake, her hands moving like a blind woman’s over him, knowing from the light outside that the moons were down, knowing the morning was war and that she loved this man more than the world.
She must have slept, because the sky was grey with the coming of dawn when she opened her eyes again, and Brandin was gone. There was a red anemone on the pillow beside her. She looked at it without moving for a moment, then picked it up and crushed it to her face inhaling the fragile scent. She wondered if he knew the legend of that flower here. Almost certainly not, she thought.
She rose, and a few moments later Scelto came in with a mug of khav in his hand. He was wearing the stiff leather vest of a messenger: lightweight inadequate armour against arrows. He had volunteered to be one of the score of such men running orders and messages up and down the hill. He had come to her first though, as he had every morning in the saishan for a dozen years. Dianora was afraid that thinking about that would make her cry: a brutal omen on such a day. She managed a smile and told him to go back to the King, who needed him more this morning.
After he left, she slowly drank her khav, listening to the growing noises outside. Then she washed and dressed herself and went out of the tent into the rising sun.
Two men of the King’s Guard were waiting for her. They went wherever she did, a discreet step or two behind, but not more than that. She would be guarded today, she knew. She looked for Brandin and saw Rhun first. They were both near the front of the flattened ridge, both bare-headed, without armour, though with identical swords belted at their sides. Brandin had chosen to dress today in the simple brown of an ordinary soldier.
She was not fooled. None of them were, or could be.
Not long after that they saw him step alone towards the edge of his hill and raise one hand above his head for all the men in both armies to see. Without a word spoken, any warning at all, a dazzling blood-crimson flare of light sprang from that upthrust hand like a flame into the deep blue of the sky. From below they heard a roar of sound, as, crying their King’s name aloud, Brandin’s outnumbered army moved forward across the valley to meet the soldiers of Alberico in a battle that had been coming for almost twenty years.
‘Not yet,’ Alessan said steadily, for the fifth time, at least. ‘We have waited years, we must not be too soon now.’
Devin had a sense that the Prince was cautioning himself more than anyone else. The truth was that until Alessan gave the word there was nothing for them to do but watch as men from Barbadior and Ygrath and the provinces of the Palm killed each other under the blazing Senzian sun.
It was noon or a little past it, by the sun. It was brutally hot. Devin tried to grasp how the men below must feel, hacking and battering each other, slipping on blood, treading the fallen in the broiling cauldron of battle. They were too high and far away to recognize anyone, but not so distant that they couldn’t see men die or hear their screams.
Their vantage point had been chosen by Alessan a week before with a sure prediction of where the two sorcerers would base themselves. And both had done exactly as he judged they would. From this sloping ridge less than half a mile south of the higher, broader rise of land where Brandin was, Devin gazed down over the valley and saw two armies knotted together in a pitiless sending of souls to Morian.
‘The Ygrathen chose his field well,’ Sandre had said with an almost detached admiration earlier that morning as the cries of horses and men began. ‘The plain is wide enough to allow him room to manoeuvre, but not so broad as to let the Barbadians flank around him without serious trouble in the hills. They would have to climb out of the valley, and then along the exposed slopes and back down again.’
‘And if you look, you will see,’ Ducas di Tregea had added, ‘that Brandin has most of his archers on his own right flank, towards the south, in case they do try that. They could pick the Barbadians off like deer among the olives on the slopes if they attempt to go around.’
One contingent of Barbadians had, in fact, tried just that an hour ago. They had been slaughtered and driven back by a rain of arrows from the archers of the Western Palm. Devin had felt a quick surge of excitement, but then that congealed within him into turmoil and confusion. The Barbadians were tyranny, yes, and all that it meant, yet how could he possibly exult in any kind of triumph for Brandin of Ygrath?
But should he then desire the death of men of the Palm at the hands of Alberico’s mercenaries? He didn’t know what to think or feel. He felt as though his soul was being stripped raw and exposed here, laid out for burning under the Senzian sky.
Catriana was standing just ahead of him, next to the Prince. Devin didn’t think he’d seen them apart from each other since Erlein had brought her back from the garden. He’d spent a di
soriented, difficult hour the morning after that, struggling to adjust to the shining thing that had so clearly overtaken them. Alessan had looked as he did when he made music, as if he’d found a hearthstone in the world. When Devin had glanced over at Alais it was to find her watching him with a curious, very private smile on her face; it left him even more confused than before. He had a sense that he wasn’t even keeping up with himself, let alone with the changes around him. He also knew that there wasn’t going to be any time to deal with such things, not with what was coming to Senzio.
In the next two days, the armies had arrived from north and south bringing with them a bone-deep awareness of destiny hanging before them all as if suspended on some balance scale of gods in the summer air.
On their ridge above the battle Devin looked back and saw Alais offering water to Rinaldo in the partial shade of a twisted olive-tree that clung to the slope of their ridge. The Healer had insisted on coming with them instead of remaining hidden with Solinghi in town. If lives are at risk then my place is there as well, was all he’d said, and he’d carried his eagle-headed staff up here with all of them before sunrise.
Devin glanced beyond them to where Rovigo stood with Baerd. He should probably be with those two, he knew. His own responsibility here was the same as theirs: to guard this hill if either sorcerer or both should send troops after them. They had sixty men: Ducas’s band, Rovigo’s brave handful of mariners, and those carefully chosen men who had made their solitary way north to Senzio in response to the messages scattered across the provinces. Sixty men. It would have to be enough.
‘Sandre! Ducas!’ Alessan said sharply, snapping Devin out of reverie. ‘Look now, and tell me.’
‘I was about to,’ Sandre said with an emerging note of excitement in his voice. ‘It is as we guessed: with his own presence on the hill Brandin is not outnumbered after all. His power is ‘too much stronger than Alberico’s. More so than I guessed, even. If you are asking my reading right now, I would say that the Ygrathen is on the edge of breaking through in the centre before the hour is out.’
‘Sooner than that,’ Ducas said in his deep voice. ‘When such things begin they happen very fast.’
Devin moved forward to see more clearly. The seething centre of the valley was as choked with men and horses as before, many of them dead and fallen. But if he used the banners as his frame of reference, it seemed, even to his untutored eye, that Brandin’s men were pushing their front lines forward now, though the Barbadians were still more numerous by far.
‘How?’ he muttered, almost to himself.
‘He weakens them with his sorcery,’ a voice to his right said. He looked over at Erlein. ‘The same way they conquered us years ago. I can feel Alberico trying to defend them, but I think Sandre has it right: the Barbadian is weakening as we speak.’
Baerd and Rovigo came quickly up from where they too had been looking down.
‘Alessan?’ Baerd said. Only the name, no more.
The Prince turned and looked at him. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We were just thinking the same thing. I think it is time. I think it has come.’ He held Baerd’s gaze for another moment; neither of them spoke. Then Alessan looked away, past the friend of his life, to the three wizards.
‘Erlein,’ he said softly. ‘You know what must be done.’
‘I do,’ said the Senzian. He hesitated. ‘Pray for the Triad’s blessing upon the three of us. Upon all of us.’
‘Whatever you’re going to do, you had better hurry,’ Ducas said bluntly. ‘The Barbadian centre is starting to give.’
‘We are in your hands,’ Alessan said to Erlein. He seemed about to say something more, but did not. Erlein turned to Sandre and Sertino who had moved nearer to him. All of the others stepped back a little, to leave the three of them alone.
‘Link!’ said Erlein di Senzio.
On the plain at the back of his army, but near to them and in their midst—because distance mattered in magic—Alberico of Barbadior had spent the morning wondering if the gods of the Empire had abandoned him at last. Even the dark-horned god of sorcerers and the night-riding Queen on her Mare. His thoughts, such thoughts as he could manage to coherently form under the ceaseless, mind-pounding onslaught of the Ygrathen, were black with awareness of ruin; it seemed to him as if there were ashes in his heart choking his throat.
It had seemed so simple once. All that would be needed were planning and patience and discipline, and if he had any qualities, any virtues at all, they were those. Twenty years’ worth of each of them here in the service of his long ambition.
But now, as the merciless bronze sun reached its zenith and slipped past and began its descent towards the sea, Alberico knew with finality that he had been right at the first and wrong at the last. Winning the whole of the Palm had never mattered, but losing it meant losing everything. Including his life. For there was nowhere to run, or hide.
The Ygrathen was brutally, stupefyingly strong. He had known it, he had always known it. Had feared the man not as a coward does, but as one who has taken the measure of something and knows exactly what it is.
At dawn, after that crimson beacon had flamed from Brandin’s hand on his hill in the west, Alberico had allowed himself to hope, even briefly to exult. He had only to defend his men. His armies were almost three times as strong and they were facing only a small number of the trained soldiers of Ygrath. The rest of the army of the Western Palm was a flung-together mélange of artisans and traders, fishermen and farmers and scarcely bearded boys from the provinces.
He had only to blunt the thrust of Brandin’s sorcery from the hill and let his soldiers do their work. He had no need to push his own powers outward against his foe. Only to resist. Only defend.
If only he could. For as the morning wore on and gathered heat to itself like a smothering cloak, Alberico felt his mind-wall begin, by grudging, agonizing degrees, to flatten and bend under the passionate, steady, numbing insistence of Brandin’s attack. Endlessly the Ygrathen’s waves of fatigue and weakness flowed down from his hill upon the Barbadian army. Wave after wave after wave, tireless as the surf.
And Alberico had to block them, to absorb and screen those waves, so his soldiers could fight on, unafraid, unsapped in their courage and strength save by the sweltering heat of the sun—which was blazing down upon the enemy too.
Well before noon some of the Ygrathen’s spell began to leak through. Alberico couldn’t hold it all. It just kept coming and coming, monotonous as rain or surf, without alteration in rhythm or degree. Simple power, hugely pouring forth.
Soon—far too soon, too early in the day—the Barbadians began to feel as if they were fighting uphill, even on a level plain, as if the sun actually was fiercer above their heads than on the men they fought, as if their confidence and courage were seeping away with the sweat that poured from them, soaking through their clothing and armour.
Only the sheer weight of numbers kept them level, kept that Senzian plain in balance all morning long. His eyes closed, sitting in the great, canopied chair they had brought for him, Alberico mopped at his face and hair continuously with water-soaked cloths and he fought Brandin of Ygrath through that morning with all his power and all the courage to which he could lay claim.
But shortly after noon, cursing himself, cursing the maggot-eaten soul of Scalvaia d’Astibar who had so nearly killed him nine months ago—and who had weakened him enough, after all, to be killing him now—cursing his Emperor for living too long as a useless, senescent, emaciated shell, Alberico of Barbadior confronted the bleak, pitiless reality that all his gods were indeed leaving him here under the burning sun of this faroff land. As the messages began streaming back from the crumbling front ranks of his army, he began preparing himself, in the way of his people, for death.
Then the miracle happened.
At first, his mind too punishingly battered, he couldn’t even grasp what was taking place. Only that the colossal weight of magic pouring down from the hill was suddenly, i
nexplicably, lightening. It was a fraction, a half of what it had been only a moment before. Alberico could sustain it. Easily! That level of magic was less than his own, even weakened as he was now. He could even push forward against that, instead of only defending. He could attack! If that was all that Brandin had left, if the Ygrathen had suddenly reached the end of his reserves.
Wildly mind-scanning the valley and the hills around for a clue, Alberico suddenly came upon the third matrix of magic, and abruptly realized—with a glory flowering out of the morning’s ashes in his heart—that the horned god was with him yet after all, and the Night Queen in her riding.
There were wizards of the Palm here, and they were helping him! They hated the Ygrathen as much as he! Somehow, for whatever incomprehensible reason, they were on his side against the man who was King of Ygrath, whatever he might pretend to call himself now.
‘I am winning!’ he shouted to his messengers. ‘Tell the captains at the front, revive their spirits. Tell them I am beating the Ygrathen back!’
He heard sudden glad cries around him. Opened his eyes to see messengers sprinting forward across the valley. He reached out towards those wizards—four or five, he judged, by their strength, perhaps six of them—seeking to merge with their minds and their power.
But in that he was balked. He knew exactly where they were. He could even see where they were—a ridge of land just south of the Ygrathen’s hill—but they would not let him join with them or know who they were. They must still be afraid of what he did to wizards when he found them.