He signed it with a flourish. ‘Felnigg, I want you to take this to General Mitterick.’

‘He might take it better from a messenger.’

‘He can take it however he damn well pleases, but I don’t want him to have any excuse to ignore it.’

Felnigg was an officer of the old school and rarely betrayed his feelings; it was one of the things Kroy had always admired about the man. But his distaste for Mitterick was evidently more than he could suppress. ‘If I must, Lord Marshal.’ And he plucked the order sourly from Kroy’s hand.

Colonel Felnigg stalked from the headquarters, nearly clubbing himself on the low lintel and only just managing to disguise his upset. He thrust the order inside his jacket pocket, checked that no one was looking and took a quick nip from his flask, then checked again and took another, pulled himself into the saddle and whipped his horse away down the narrow path, sending servants, guardsmen and junior officers scattering.

If it had been Felnigg put in command of the Siege of Ulrioch all those years ago and Kroy sent off on a fruitless ride to dusty nowhere, Felnigg who had reaped the glory and Kroy who had ridden thirsty back with his twenty captured wagons to find himself a forgotten man, things could so easily have been different. Felnigg might have been the lord marshal now, and Kroy his glorified messenger boy.

He clattered down from the hillside, spurring west towards Adwein along the puddle-pocked track. The ground sloping down to the river crawled with Jalenhorm’s men, still struggling to find some semblance of organisation. Seeing things done in so slovenly a manner caused Felnigg something close to physical pain. It was the very most he could do not to pull up his horse, start screaming orders at all and sundry and put some damn purpose into them. Purpose – was that too much to ask in an army?

‘Bloody Jalenhorm,’ Felnigg hissed. The man was a joke, and not even a funny one. He had neither the wit nor experience for a sergeant’s place, let alone a general’s, but apparently having been the king’s old drinking partner was better qualification than years of competent and dedicated service. It would have been enough to make a lesser man quite bitter, but Felnigg it only drove to greater heights of excellence. He slowed for a moment to take another nip from his flask.

On the grassy slope to his right there had been some manner of accident. Aproned engineers fussed around two huge tubes of dark metal and a large patch of blackened grass. Bodies were laid out by the road, bloody sheets for shrouds. No doubt the First of the Magi’s damn fool experiment blown up in everyone’s faces. Whenever the Closed Council became directly involved in warfare there was sure to be some heavy loss of life and, in Felnigg’s experience, rarely on the enemy’s side.

‘Out of the way!’ he roared, forcing a path through a herd of foraged cattle that should never have been allowed on the road and making one of its handlers dive for the verge. He cantered through Adwein, as miserable a village as he had ever seen and packed today with miserable faces, injured men and filthy remnants of who-knew-what units. The useless, self-pitying flotsam of Mitterick’s failed assaults, swept out the back of his division like dung from a stables.