“But you would be dead. How would that serve the attainment of your goals?”

“There are things more important than my goals,” Isana said.

“Such as the survival of your people.”

“Yes.”

“And that of your son.”

Isana swallowed. She said, “Yes.”

The vord Queen considered that for a time. Then she returned her eyes to the ceiling, and said, “You answered me clearly and promptly. As a reward, you may go to your male. Assure yourself of his health. See that I have not yet taken his life. If you attempt to escape or attack me, I will prevent you. And tear off his lips as punishment. Do you understand?”

Isana ground her teeth, staring at the Queen. Then she rose and walked to Araris. “I understand.”

The Queen’s glittering eyes flicked to her once more, then turned back to the ceiling. “Excellent,” she said. “I am glad that we have begun learning to speak to each other. Grandmother.”

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 16

Amara watched the battle with the vord unfold from the air.

She had seen battles before, but mostly those joined between Alera’s Legions and her more traditional foes—the forces of rebel Lords and High Lords, smaller-scale conflicts with armed outlaws, and of course, the Second Battle of the Calderon Valley, fought between multiple factions of the Marat and the hideously outnumbered defenders of Garrison, at the valley’s easternmost end.

This battle bore little resemblance to those.

The vord approached, not like an army in the array of battle but like an oncoming wave, a tide of gleaming green-black darkness beneath the light of a weak moon. It was like watching the shadow of a storm cloud roll forward over the landscape—the vord moved with the same steady, implacable speed, with the same sense of impersonal, devouring hunger. It was an easy matter to track their progress: There was little light upon the lands of Riva, but where the vord walked, they consumed it all.

By contrast, the Legions were clothed in light. All up and down the Aleran lines, the standards of the individual centuries and cohorts blazed with furycrafted fire, each in the signature colors of their Legions and home cities. In the center of the lines, the Crown Legion was a blaze of scarlet-and-azure light, flanked by First and Second Aquitaine in a shroud of crimson fire. The right flank was centered upon the veteran forces of High Lord Antillus, burning with cold blue-and-white light, the left around the similarly veteran Legions of High Lord Phrygius, its standards sheathed in glacial green-and-white fire.

Other Legions, some from cities that no longer remained standing, all of them far less experienced than the northern veterans, had been interspaced between those three points and spread across the rich fields surrounding the plain south of Riva in a wall of solid steel and light.