Camjiata glanced overhead to where the sun had almost reached the zenith. “We should have broken the Coalition army before now. Drake, why have your fire mages not crushed every cold mage on the field? You assured me that fire would easily defeat ice.”

“There are so many cold mages, and they’re working in concert in a way they did not before, not even at Lemovis.”

“No doubt they can learn from experience as well as we can,” remarked Camjiata as he took a spyglass from an orderly. “Matters grow urgent. Lord Marius need only hold his ground and not retreat until the Romans arrive, and then we will be crushed between anvil and hammer. Our frontal attacks are hurting them, but not fast enough.”

He examined the sprawling field of battle in all its churning confusion, so many thousands of men that it seemed the earth crawled. “There. See how the Invictus Legion holds its ground. We have to turn their flank, for a frontal attack will not break them.”

He angled the spyglass to the north. About half a mile away a fortified estate stood amid the green crowns of an orchard. I remembered passing the house and gardens with Lord Gwyn’s skirmishers, who had told me it was called Red Mount. The compound had two walls, an outer wall that ringed the orchard and gardens and an inner wall that fortified the stone house. The flag of the Tarrant infantry, Lord Marius’s own crack troops, flew from the main house.

A column of Iberian infantry had laid siege to the estate an hour earlier. As we watched, a skirmish raged. Fire scorched across the orchard. Defenders hiding in the trees raced for the inner wall to escape the flames, but even as they were running the flames were sucked right out, killed by cold magic. Crossbow bolts rained over the wall, pummeling the Iberian infantry as it tried to advance. The struggle within the walled orchard was not visible, nor from this distance could I hear the sounds of whatever desperate melee was taking place beneath the trees.

“How can it be we have not yet taken that estate?” demanded Camjiata of his staff. His temper flashed, as dark as storm clouds. “Can you not see that it anchors the western flank of the Coalition army? No wonder Lord Marius holds the field. He need not worry about this flank, and thus can keep his center strong and take heavy losses against our superior weaponry but smaller numbers. Drake, why have the fire mages you brag of been defeated yet again by cold magic?”

Drake had his own spyglass, which he turned toward the estate.