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 disoriented, 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
