Fjerda and Ravka had been at odds for hundreds of years, sometimes meeting in outright conflict, sometimes skirmishing when treaties were in place. But this was the war Fjerda meant to win. They knew Ravka was outnumbered and without reinforcements. They intended to tear through the northern border in surprise attacks at Nezkii and Ulensk. After swift victories, they would push south to the capital, where Nikolai’s meager army would be forced to retreat and make some kind of heroic stand.

Nikolai looked out over the field. The land north of Nezkii was little more than a shallow, muddy basin, a sad stretch of nothing stuck in a state between swamp and pasture, impossible to farm and bearing a strong odor of sulfur. It was known as the Pisspot, and it was not the stuff of which glorious battle songs were written. It offered little cover and miserable soil for his foot soldiers, who were already up to their ankles in the muck. But he doubted it would stop Fjerdan tanks.

Nikolai’s commanders had erected wooden platforms and towers to get a better view of the battlefield—all of it camouflaged behind the straggly scrub and low, twisted trees the Pisspot was known for.

The sun was barely visible in the east. From the north, Nikolai heard a sputtering sound like some great beast clearing its throat—Fjerda’s war machines firing their angry engines to life. Black smoke rose on the horizon, an orchard of columns, a promise of the invasion to come.

The tanks sounded like thunder rolling over the horizon, but they looked like monsters that had crawled out of the mud, their gray hides glinting dully, their giant treads eating up earth. It was a disheartening sight, but if not for Nina, their blessed termite eating at the heart of Fjerda’s government, Ravka never would have seen them coming at all.

Nina’s note had given them the two points on the border where their enemies planned to launch their surprise invasion. Ravka had barely had time to mobilize their forces and put up some kind of defense.

Nikolai could have chosen to meet the enemy in the field, banners up, troops in plain sight. A show of force. It would have been the honorable thing, the brave thing. But Nikolai figured his soldiers were more interested in surviving than looking noble before the Fjerdans shot them full of holes, and he felt the same.

“Do you think they know?” Tolya asked, peering through binoculars that looked like a child’s toy in his huge hands.

Tamar shook her head. “If they did, they’d be staying very, very still.”

Boom. The first explosion echoed over the basin, seeming to shake the mud they stood in.

A silent signal moved down the ranks: Hold your position.

Another explosion ruptured the air around them. Then another. Another.

But those weren’t the sounds of tank guns firing. They were mines.