“Send an orderly to find her something else to wear. Bloody Camulos! Give me a spyglass! Look at the Coalition center collapse! Captain Tira, I want the Amazon Corps to march to the eastern flank. Lieutenant! Ride this dispatch to Marshal Aualos. I want Lord Marius’s retreating forces cut off from the city gates. I do not want any Coalition troops or any mages escaping into Lutetia. I want no street-by-street fighting. I want a clear, emphatic victory.”

Artillery boomed in sheets of thunder. Drums and horns beat out the pace of the advance as Camjiata’s army roared forward, rifles ablaze and smoke gusting in windy bursts.

Messengers came and went as the general directed the battle from the tower. The stone house echoed with the groans of wounded.

A man bumped into me, swearing as he dumped a pot of scalding coffee to splash on the floor.

The general said, “Get her out of the way!”

I opened my hands to find them coated in sticky, drying blood. Swells and ebbs of memory surged in my head: the way flesh parts like a sigh as the blade slices; the submissive acquiescence of the hunted when it accepts it has been marked for death. Blood was spattered all down the front of my clothes. I tried to shake myself free of the awful sight, only I could not get away from myself.

No one took the least notice of me stumbling down the steps. The stone house was crammed with wounded. The stink of blood and piss and excrement melded with the rumble of artillery and gunfire, although the sound was ebbing because the advance of Camjiata’s army was pushing the battlefront away from our position. I staggered into the back court and to a trough filled with pink and slimy water. I stripped off my blood-sodden jacket and fumblingly managed the slippery buttons of the skirt. Then I dumped a bucket full of dirty water over me once, twice, three times until I was gasping and shivering and began, at last, to feel human.

In my bodice and drawers I decided I would have to hunt for clothes, for I could not bear to dress myself back in the blood of men I did not remember killing.

“Trooper! What in the seven hells are you doing here? Your Amazons marched out two hours ago!” A sergeant wearing the Armorican ship jabbed at me with his finger. “Dereliction! Guards! Arrest—!”

I grabbed his out-thrust wrist and twisted it until he yelped. “I am Camjiata’s ward, not an Amazon. Leave me be!”

When I released his wrist, he retreated two steps. A tang of fearful respect charged his scent. “By the Black Bull! Are you the assassin they say killed twenty men in the first assault without receiving a scratch?”