More vordknights appeared, beginning to dive upon the crews of the mules—but each team of Knights Flora had retreated from the wall to its assigned war engine, and they began providing their mule crews with a deadly shield of withering archery. Vordknights fell from the skies and smashed to the earth like rotten fruit. One of them came down on the small ammunition wagon of fire-spheres behind one of the mules, and it exploded in a sudden angry bellow of fire that roared out and consumed the vordknight, the wagon, the mule, its screaming crewmen, and the archers who had been protecting them. Deadly shards of wood from the shattered wagon flew out in every direction, wounding more men on either side, and Amara saw one shard no less than four feet long completely transfix one legionare’s thigh, sending the man screaming to the floor of the battlements.

Amara made a gesture to the trumpeter, and the man sounded the call for an aerial attack. With a roar, hundreds of Citizens and Knights Aeris rose into the skies to do battle with the enemy in the darkness overhead. The sound of their windstreams was like the roaring of the sea crashing against stone cliffs. Each unit of Knights was led by Counts and Lords, many of them gifted in multiple disciplines of furycraft, and the number of exploding firecraftings overhead doubled and redoubled, a soaring panoply of brief-lived, swollen stars in every color imaginable. Roaring windstreams rose and fell in pitch and tone, making oddly musical harmonies amidst the flashes of chromatic fire.

Every eye in the whole of the Calderon Valley not being used to fight for survival was glued to the beautiful, deadly display.

“And now that our attention is on the sky,” Bernard said, “it’s time for the surprise attack. Your Lordship, if you would be so kind as to light the field.”

Lord Gram stood nearby and grunted acknowledgment. Though the Princeps had put Bernard in charge of the defenses, Amara’s husband had also served Gram for many years as one of the first Steadholders placed in the then-Count’s service. Now Gram was a Lord (granted, his lands had been overrun by the enemy, but he was still a Lord), and her husband had made an extra effort to show Gram courtesy, despite his pained jaw. Gram didn’t need it, Amara thought, and would have been perfectly comfortable following a simple order—but even in the face of ruin, Bernard had the presence of mind to be considerate. She supposed that, in a way, that sort of grace was symbolic of a great deal of what they were fighting for; the preservation of unnecessary beauty.