Still he stared away. “Then take your disobedience north. Harness it to victory. The warchiefs expect you . . . Ashanal.”

The drums faded. A third hiss of arrows cleaved the grey morning. Melanna caught her breath. The heir’s salute. For all his rigid manner, for all his stern tone, her father had just decreed that his daughter was the equal of a son. Her heart swelled, its burdens forgotten.

“I shall make you proud, Father.”

His hand slipped from the pommel and gripped hers. “You already have, essavim.”

The ridged metal of his gauntlet dug into Melanna’s flesh. She didn’t care.

“Now go,” he said. “You have duties to fulfil. For your goddess, and for your emperor.”

After an eternity beneath the boughs of Davenwood, the trees fell away. Josiri hauled his steed to a standstill, awed and terrified at the spectacle below.

At that distance, warriors were no more than ants marching to a purpose. Walls of spears, fronted by bright colours and stark emblems. A golden wedge of cavalry at the centre, and another of silver and white to the north. The lumbering, implacable tread of grunda wagons. And everywhere, the foreboding promise of the drums.

Josiri beheld it all and regretted his hasty departure from Branghall without taking down his uncle’s armour from its plinth. One more regret to join all the others from recent days.

[[We’re too late.]] Anastacia tightened her grip around Josiri’s waist.

His gaze drifted to the Tressian lines. The thin, truncated Tressian lines that waxed thickest between two uneven palisades. At the northern end, amid the broken ground of the Davenwood Heights, there were no lines to speak of, just clusters of warriors among the rocks. Hopeless. It looked hopeless.

And Calenne was in the thick of it. Because of him.

“No,” he said firmly, as much to convince himself as Anastacia. “We’re not. If I can make Crovan see sense . . .”

But it wasn’t that easy, was it? Convincing Crovan didn’t guarantee victory. It merely shifted the odds. But what else was there?

[[And if you can’t?]]

The drums quickened. Golden cavalry dipped spears and rowelled their horses to the charge. Horns rang out. A ballista shot from the nearer bastion ploughed a bloody furrow in the shadowthorn lines. Arrows arced high and shivered against shields.

A chill gripped Josiri’s gut. He welcomed it. Better fear than the anger and self-loathing of late. For the first time in days, he felt like himself.

“Then I’m going down there anyway,” he said. “Alone, if I must.”

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Seven

The cataphract charge held no subtlety, apt for those who took to the field in armour that shone like the sun. Instead, Kai Saran gathered his finest warriors like a thunderbolt and hurled them across the field.