Within minutes, the rest of the sa’ceurai had made the crossing. As Feir had said, both sides fought man-to-man, breaking into a thousand duels, though neither side was above hamstringing an enemy whose back was turned. Despite the bulkiness that made the sa’ceurai’s lacquer armor look heavy, the men danced.

Lantano Garuwashi presided over it all, dealing death every time highlanders pushed through the lines to get to him, but mostly watching. The air around him winked and sparkled, and Vi figured those were arrows or magic the Khalidorans where shooting at him. A terrified-looking magus sat on a horse directly behind Garuwashi, making constant gestures as he protected the war leader.

Vi saw the effect of the meisters before she could see the meisters themselves. The sa’ceurai lines seemed to ripple back as if all of them had been struck at once. Then she saw green fireballs arcing over the highlanders to splatter among the sa’ceurai, the flame turning blue where it hit flesh and sizzling, black smoke rising from a hundred bodies on fire.

In that instant, the sa’ceurai advance faltered. Lantano Garuwashi waved his hand forward frantically, and his standard bearer was waving a flag furiously, but his men sank back. A dozen green fireballs splattered against Garuwashi’s shields and they nearly collapsed. He sawed his horse’s head back toward the river and joined his men’s retreat, waving his hands and cursing them all the way.

A cry went up from the highlanders and they surged forward. They’d routed the Ceurans.

But from the rear, where the Khalidorans couldn’t see, it looked all wrong. While those in the front made big, panicky gestures, none threw down their weapons as they fled. The sa’ceurai closest to the river sheathed their blades and calmly carried the wounded between them in twos. Lantano Garuwashi’s frenzied waving, the whipping flag—it hadn’t been the same flag he’d used for the advance, had it?—it was all a setup.

“Palies comin’!” someone shouted.

Across the bridge in front of Vi, hundreds of Khalidoran soldiers were running to their places. Their archers loosed a flight of arrows. Feir threw his hands up and a shimmering transparent blue sheet of magic unrolled above the Cenarians, covering those at the foot of the bridge. The first arrows hit the shield and, to Vi’s surprise, didn’t burst into flame. Rather, they hit the shield like it was a pincushion, poked through it, and robbed of all speed, simply dropped the last five feet onto the Cenarians.

“Archers, shoot from outside the umbrella!” Feir shouted, but not before several of them had loosed shots into it. The outgoing arrows stabbed through the umbrella, flew half a dozen feet, then came to rest back on top of the umbrella again, lacking even the energy to make it back to the ground.

“Meisters!” someone screamed.