Crown of Vengeance

slaughter them,” Vieliessar countered. “I think that must be what they intend. The nobles who follow me are inconvenient; their lands have undoubtedly been promised away. Slaughter the komen and the princes and the Alliance will believe it can reclaim the commons.”

Rithdeliel sighed, wordlessly acknowledging the truth of her argument. “Onward, then,” he said.

The next day she discovered Nilkaran had fled, leaving his army in the care of Warlord Handeloriel while he rode south-east with a handful of grand-tailles. Vieliessar knew Nilkaran didn’t trust Handeloriel any more than Nilkaran trusted anyone, but he must have given him very explicit orders, for Warlord Handeloriel circled constantly through the eastern Tamabeth Hills. No matter what she did, Vieliessar couldn’t force him to a stand. When she attempted to break off, to see if laying siege to Nilkaran’s vulnerable Great Keep would gain her the battle she sought, Handeloriel immediately moved to harry her vulnerable baggage train.

And then she ran out of time.

Three days after her first battle with Nilkaran, the armies of the Alliance invaded Jaeglenhend in force. Only the fact that her army had continued moving east saved it from being destroyed immediately. A little thought led Vieliessar to the realization that it was likely that the Alliance had asked its Lightborn to widen the path through the Mystrals so that their army and its baggage train had room to maneuver.

Even the most conservative Lightborn could be pressured into doing that much. And I know whose mind crafted such a clever plan.

Vieliessar called for retreat, knowing two War Princes could not agree with each other, let alone twelve, and knowing that the longer she kept the Alliance in the field, the greater the possibility they would begin to fight among themselves. As she fell back, she expected the Alliance’s komen to charge and engage, using their traditional tactics: gallop madly into the enemy for the joy of the charge, then fight a series of single combats governed by antique rules of honor.

But the Alliance komen did not charge in force. The Alliance commander held back a portion of his troops and, under the cover of the charge, used it to cut Vieliessar off from her vulnerable baggage- train. When he’d done that, he continued to allow her superiority on the field as he drove her wagons and herds back toward the Alliance lines.

At the same time, the Alliance Lightborn struck.

The bright day dimmed rapidly as clouds boiled up over the crown of the Mystrals. The air was chokingly thick with Magery as Vieliessar’s Warhunt Mages vied with the Alliance Lightborn—a battle of Magery waged side by side with one of flesh and steel. She had to admit it was an elegant tactical compromise. Most of the Lightborn with the Alliance would refuse to use Magery on the battlefield. But they would see working the weather as only a small compromise with Mosirinde’s Covenant.

In time her Lightborn might have prevailed, but most of the Warhunt was still on its way back from Jaeglenhend Great Keep and the storm had a momentum of its own. It was all her remaining Lightborn could do to keep the Lightning drawn from its clouds from hitting Vieliessar’s army.

Soon the rising wind was filled with snow. The battlefield became shrouded in white as the out-of-season blizzard strengthened. The sound of the warhorns and signal whistles was muted and garbled by the snow and the wind, making it impossible to pass orders reliably. Visibility was so poor that no one could see the banners carried by the knights-herald.

The storm stripped away every advantage Vieliessar possessed. The snow distempered the archer’s bowstrings so they could not loose their arrows; her infantry slipped and skidded on the icy ground. Vieliessar was forced to abandon pursuit of her baggage train and deploy her knights to guard her infantry’s retreat, for the enemy, identifying her weakest point, eschewed combat with their fellow komen to attack the infantry instead.

The infantry’s horses had been lost with the baggage train. The Warhunt could not Call them back, for the whole of the Alliance army stood between the beasts and their summoners. The injured died where they fell, or clung grimly to their saddlebows and rode after the fleeing infantry.

Even then, Vieliessar might have stolen the meat of victory from defeat’s cookfire. But Lord Nilkaran had rejoined his army and led it against her defenseless wounded and fleeing foot soldiers. All she could do was retreat, retreat, retreat as she tried to keep her army intact.

She’d never been so grateful for sunset and an end to the day’s fighting. She spent the night trying to find the scattered elements of her army. Near dawn, Vieliessar made the only choice she could. South of Jaeglenhend, the Uradabhur became league upon league of primal wilderness. Nilkaran would still have a declared border, for a border was necessary for the setting of Wards, but he would either have stripped the border towers of their defenders entirely, or left them with so few that the members of the Warhunt still with the army could easily overpower them. The order went to all warriors she could reach, by Lightborn or by Lightless messenger: retreat on a south-southeast salient. Do not regroup. Do not engage the enemy.

The border keeps would provide food, shelter, and defense. The forest beyond would return the advantage to Vieliessar, for the Alliance komen could not use cavalry in forests so dense a rider could barely pass through them.

If they could reach it.

But if the first day of the battle had been bad, the next was worse. The Alliance had brought its pavilions and supplies up to its battle lines and were able to attack again as soon as there was light enough to see.

Her komen’s destriers were cold and hungry, making them irritable and difficult to control. Her army was dazed and groggy from a night without shelter. The blizzard had been raging for nearly a full day and the snowdrifts were deep. Today the horses of both armies floundered ponderously through the drifts, and it was as if the komen fought in slow motion through the still-falling snow.

But they fought.

Vieliessar had long-since abandoned the idea of fighting to a victory; all she hoped for now was to retreat with her army. Iardalaith’s force had rejoined her during the night, but every spell they tried— she tried—against the attacking knights or their mounts simply didn’t work. Their Lightborn must have been Warding everything that breathed for sennight upon sennight to have Warded so many thousand komen and horses. The only spell that was of any effect was Shield, and to ask her Lightborn to hold it along the entire line of skirmish, for candlemarks, was to ask them to doom the land.

* * *

“You have to use Dispell!” she shouted to Iardalaith over the clamor of the battle.

She’d ridden back through her lines to give Firthorn a brief respite from the fighting. Most of the Warhunt was gathered at the rear; being willing to fight was not the same as being able to defend oneself on a battlefield.

“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” Iardalaith snapped. “Even if we could, we’d be helpless afterward!”

“Which do you like better—helpless or dead?” Vieliessar demanded. The only thing saving them so far was that the Alliance komen couldn’t charge their lines at speed. Vieliessar had only been able to find about a third of her army before the day’s fighting had begun; the force she commanded was outnumbered two to one.

“You can be both if you have to retreat and we’re too drained to protect you!”

“Think of something.” She wasn’t certain he could hear her. Just as well. She spurred Firthorn away before she was tempted to repeat herself more loudly.

A candlemark later, near midday, the storm finally broke and the clouds rolled back, but Vieliessar could feel the Weather Magery in the air like a dull ache behind her eyes; there would be another storm by sunset. As the temperature rose, the surface of the snow became veiled in mist. Pools of water lay in the hollows of the drifts, flaring like burning silver in the sunlight. When the temperature dropped again, the water-sodden snow would freeze into solid ice. In winter, palfreys and mules wore studded shoes to keep them from slipping on frozen ground. The destriers would have no such protection. There had already been several casualties on both sides as warhorses had slipped in the churned mud of the battlefield and gone down hard enough to break a leg.

The Alliance had remounts available—some of them Vieliessar’s, taken as spoils of war.

In the distance, she could see the pavilions of the enemy. For a moment she dared to hope: what Lightborn could see, they could affect, and Fire was the first spell every Postulant learned. But even Tangisen Lightbrother, who swore he could kindle a stone into flame, could not set the enemy’s tents alight.

She could feel failure and defeat prowling around the edges of the battle like wolves starved by winter’s cold.