We turned off the main road and entered a village empty of every soul except the soldiers moving through. On a prominence men had felled three trees that blocked the view northeast over the battlefield. Clouds bunched up in the north, dark with unshed rain. Closer at hand a dense mist concealed the high ground and thus the entirety of the Coalition army. Camjiata surveyed the mist through a spyglass.

“James, the mist seems unnatural. I expected to see Lutetia’s walls from here. Can you disperse it?”

“The mist is a fog created by cold magic. To create such an extent, across a full mile or more of ground, means many cold mages have coordinated their efforts.”

“Can your fire magic not vanquish this cold fog, James? I’m surprised to hear it.”

“I can do anything! But it’s not worth risking fire mages so close to the lines. The sun will disperse it in time.”

A smile teased Camjiata’s lips, as if Drake’s sullen defensiveness amused him, but I was sure I was the only one who noticed it. “Tell Marshal Aualos to order the artillery to begin a barrage into the mist. That will soften them and perhaps hasten the mist’s dispersal as well.”

Messengers came and went, one after the next. Sometimes they had to wait while Camjiata read dispatches and wrote replies for men ahead of them. Everything took so long as soldiers trudged into position and artillery was drawn in by horses. An hour passed, then another.

The battlefront expanded into the east, masses of men hidden by distance but also because the mist continued to hang low, not burning off even as the sun rose higher.

Finally the artillery began to fire in thundering blasts of sound. Smoke rose. I heard thumps, distant cries, the screams of horses. How must it feel to stand as death fell unseen out of the sky? How I hated this waiting! I was confident that Bee remained fairly safe in Lutetia, but where was Vai? How vulnerable was he?

Canyons of light appeared as cracks in the mist. Figures appeared and vanished like dreams of ghosts. With a rumble of hooves a troop of Coalition cavalry swept out of its misty concealment. Rifle fire from the Iberian line cracked as the infantry formed into squares to face the charge, but the horses did not crash into the square; instead, as the cavalry circled, all the rifles went silent. Out of this chaos of stillness and motion, crossbow bolts and longbow arrows flew with killing precision into the Iberian ranks. In the midst of the cavalry, despite the distance between us, I recognized Vai. I knew he would go with the first wave, put himself at risk in case the attack did not work.