“They certainly have so far.”

“Hell.” The cavalryman broke into a gap-toothed smile. “I always said infantry was such an easy job that girls could do it.”

Winter rolled her eyes. Not perfect, but I’ll take what I can get. Any reaction was better than Lieutenant Novus’. She turned her attention back to the note, which included a hastily sketched map that she compared to the terrain she could see with the last of the fading light.

“All right,” she said, looking up. “I think I understand. Thank you for your help, Colonel. I understand we’ve got an artillery battery?”

“Captain Archer,” Give-Em-Hell said, nodding. “He’s camped over there a ways.”

“Janus says here that I’m to be in overall command of the force,” Winter said. “That’s not going to be a problem, is it?”

Give-Em-Hell pushed his hat back and scratched at his thinning hair. “Not unless you’re planning on keeping me out of the action.”

“You’ll get plenty of action, don’t worry. But it needs to be on my order.”

“I understand,” he said. “Just wave your hat, and we’ll give ’em hell.”

“Excellent.” Winter glanced at her officers and nodded toward the woods. “Follow me.”

It was fortunate that the moon was high and three-quarters full, because Winter forbade any of the torch-carrying cavalry pickets from accompanying her and the small group of officers into the forest. It wasn’t a true wild wood, but a well-tended belt of trees occupying the rocky ground at the top of the ridge, separating one shallow valley from the next. Still, picking their way through it went slowly, and it was a half hour before they were at the other side and looking down on what would, tomorrow, be a battlefield.

Campfires sparkled in long, parallel lines, marking the positions of the opposing armies. On Winter’s left, an irregular series of hills was topped by a few farmhouses and barns, and studded here and there with the regular shapes of orchards. Small fires burned all through their yards and down their slopes, avoiding the low-lying gaps between them. On her right, across two or three miles of valley flatland, another army was camped in a tighter mass behind the protection of a wandering stream.

Now and then, nervous pickets down between the two forces fired at one another, or at fleeting shadows. Each musket shot was a sharp pinprick of fire, followed seconds later by the distant clap of the report.

“That’s Janus,” Winter said, pointing to the left, then sweeping her arm across the valley. “And that’s di Pfalen.”

“Unless he’s building fake campfires, that’s a hell of a lot of Hamveltai,” Cyte said.

Winter nodded. “At least as many as Janus has, probably more.”

“So what does he want us to do?”