Crown of Vengeance

surcoat with the red otter that marked her as a knight of Oronviel. The bay destrier she rode danced and fretted beneath her hand, yet she controlled him effortlessly.

When the advancing column finally stopped, Runacarendalur was relieved. He watched as it split, then split again, spreading and reforming behind the first line as gracefully as if the whole of the army danced. They do not wish to be caught unawares while they make camp, he decided.

Then Thoromarth spoke again and Vieliessar took up her helm and slid it over her head. Runacarendalur could not say why watching her give her helm the small back-and-forth twist to lock it into place made him feel so uneasy. It was something he’d done himself a thousand times. More.

And so has she. Runacarendalur frowned. Why does she helm if they are to make camp?

Then—impossibly—he heard the mellow dangerous song of warhorns.

Right flank: wheel. Left flank: hold. Center: advance.

Against all sense and custom, Oronviel was attacking.

Now.

He spurred his palfrey and galloped back to the camp, shouting for the alarm to be sounded, for his knights to arm themselves. Some had heard the enemy warhorns. Most had not. And only a handful were in armor. This is madness! Runacarendalur thought in outrage. The Code of Battle demands challenge be made and answered before the engagement begins! Not a random attack the moment you catch sight of your enemy! This is none of Thoromarth’s doing! Vieliessar fights as if she is a hedgerow bandit!

He reached his tent and flung himself from his saddle. Helecanth’s pavilion was pitched beside his own, and she’d come running at the sound of his horse. Runacarendalur noted with despair that his guard captain was as unready to fight as his entire army.

“My lord?” she said.

Runacarendalur opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again as the first of the Caerthalien horns sounded: To horse, to horse, arm yourself, to battle …

“I shall bring Gwaenor,” she said, and took off for the horselines at a run.

“My armor!” Runacarendalur shouted as he entered his tent. If they had reached us before the camp was set it would have been a disaster, he thought numbly. Only the flanks and the vanguard had been riding in armor, and no one had been riding destriers. But they meant to attack the moment they saw us.

Nithiach, his chamber page, came rushing out of the pavilion’s inner chamber, a polishing cloth in his hands. Runacarendalur shouted again for his armor and began stripping off his clothes. He struggled with his boots for a moment before sitting down on a chest to yank them off.

His arming page was nowhere to be found. Nithiach would have to serve; there was not time to find Arnarth. As Nithiach returned with Runacarendalur’s aketon and padded leather trews, the booming of the war drums overlaid the discordant and clashing sound of the horns.

Lengiathion Warlord always said battles could be won or lost by the speed a knight could arm, and I never believed him.…

He struggled into the complex elements of his armor, swearing at Nithiach in his desperate need to be armed, to be away. He nearly shouted at Helecanth to leave when she entered, followed by her arming page.

“They advance.” She had to shout to be heard over the uproar: horns and drums and knights shouting and the clatter of metal and the screams of overexcited horses. “I have ordered Ladyholder Glorthiachiel’s guard to move her wagon back and to keep her and Princess Nanduil inside, even if they must tie them hand and foot and nail the doors of the wagon shut.”

“They’d probably rather face Oronviel,” Runacarendalur muttered. “Good. How many—?” How many can we send against them at once?

“Five hundred,” Helecanth said grimly. “Enough to hold them until the rest arm. They will stand—if you are there.”

Runacarendalur settled his helm on his head. As he gave it the small twist to lock it into place, the vivid image of Vieliessar doing just the same filled his mind.

* * *

War was a thing of beauty. Runacarendalur had always believed this. The clash of two lines of knights meeting at full gallop, the moments of bravery and skill that were the fruit of a lifetime of training, the joyful dance of death when two knights fought each other as if no one else existed—He was a prince of Caerthalien, a knight, a warrior: he carried the honor of his House upon his shoulders each time he rode into battle.

But today was different. He’d been given no time to scout the battlefield, to meet with his commanders, to tell each where they must stand and where they must go, to settle the signals that would allow him to deploy hundreds of knights as easily as he flexed the fingers of his hand. Instead, he galloped from camp with barely a sixth of his army and only one thought in his mind: push Oronviel back and buy his komen time to take the field. He shouted orders to Helecanth as Gwaenor and Rochonan galloped side by side, and Helecanth put her warhorn to her lips and relayed them to the knights that followed: Break for the tuathal flank. Force it back into the center.

It was a proven strategy, especially when the enemy could not call up reserves to replace his losses. Since Thoromarth had not been able to position his reserves off the field, effectively he had no reserves—all his force was committed at the same time. The flanking positions were traditionally a fast moving force, meant to sweep an enemy’s fighters into the center where they could be hammered by heavy cavalry. If Runacarendalur could force Thoromarth’s tuathal flank into the body of his main force, he could not only destroy the flanking force but attack the center at a weak point. The main body of the column would have no place to go: if it retreated, the deosil wing would be behind it.

It should have worked.

Instead, as soon as Runacarendalur’s advance force was fully committed to an attack on the tuathal side, the whole of Thoromarth’s force spun as if it were a millstone turning on its axis. The tuathal flank was not forced against the center: the center swung right as the tuathal flank retreated in good order and the deosil flank elongated and galloped across what had—seconds before—been the center. In another few moments Runacarendalur’s advance force would be trapped between the two flanking forces while the former center line— now an enormously over-full deosil flank—continued its inexorable advance on his camp.

It was a stunning innovation in tactics.

Thoromarth could not have done this, Runacarendalur realized, even as his troop spun and struck the wing of Oronviel’s army that was coming up behind them. He could no longer see the whole of the battlefield. In moments, it had become a dizzying blur of knights and flashing swords.

And it is but four candlemarks to sunset, and how are you to shape the course of the battle if you are in it?

From the moment he’d proposed this expedition against Oronviel, Runacarendalur had held in his mind the image of how it would go: a raiding party cutting a swathe of destruction across the land from the border towers to the walls of Oronviel’s Great Keep. There he would face the force Oronviel placed in the field against him; at the sight of the red pennions flying from Caerthalien’s standards, the knights of Ivrithir would flee to their own domain.…

That was the dream, and he had not been willing to let go of it. And so he had led his knights into battle as if this were a raiding party. It did not matter that there was no plan of battle to oversee, no order of battle for him to shape and direct, nor that his knights would have been thrown into even greater disorder if he had not led them himself. He had made a disastrous miscalculation—and Caerthalien would pay the price of it.

Father wished me to bring back the army intact.…

That was already impossible. But if he could slay Vieliessar, the act would redeem at least a part of his folly. He risked a glance at the larger force surrounding him. Yes. There. The standard of Oronviel. She would be beneath it.