The last thing Gwenna thought before the starshatter exploded, tearing through bone and flesh, rending the bodies of dozens of helpless people like so much rotten meat, was that, until that moment, she’d never heard Talal raise his voice.

47

The histories were horseshit.

Adare had read about warfare in the histories. She had pored over the intricate maps of Annur’s most famous battles, studying the neat lines of advance and retreat, committing to memory the most classic short pieces: Fleck’s Five Principles of Cavalry, Venner’s Longbows and Flatbows, Huel-Hang’s The Heart of a Conflict. She’d been through Hendran’s cryptic volume twice during the march north, grilling Fulton and Ameredad on the more obscure points. She didn’t expect to become a battlefield commander, certainly not by reading a few old books, but she had hoped that her hasty study of war might help her to better understand the events churning around her, maybe even to save a few lives. The soldiers who had marched all this way to fight and die at her command deserved an emperor who would make an effort to understand what she had asked of them.

And so she had pored over the books until her lids drooped and the maps swam before her eyes only to discover here, now, in the midst of the furious battle for Andt-Kyl, that the books had told her less than nothing. The chaos in the streets of the tiny logging town seemed more like a riot than a battle. There were no disciplined blocks of men working in concert, no ordered sequence of attack and defense, no clear delineation between friend and foe. Instead, there was madness. The leather-clad loggers of the town ran in all directions, some cradling vicious wounds, some collapsed in doorways weeping, some hurling buckets of water on burning buildings, some charging down the street brandishing axes and crude spears, pointing and hollering in a direction that Adare desperately hoped was east.

Three times she had seen knots of Urghul horsemen—some no more than twenty paces distant—and three times Fulton had forced her to backtrack, to take a different route, his face grim as he spat orders at the Aedolians under his command, gesturing with his naked sword.

He had almost refused to let her into the town at all.

“You can only do two things in Andt-Kyl,” he told her bluntly, staring at the smoking village from the western shore of the Black, where they had paused while il Tornja and the Army of the North pushed ahead. “You can get in the way, or you can die, Your Radiance.”

“I need to see it,” she had insisted.

“You can see it from here. It will make even less sense up close.”

She stared at her Aedolian. “Are you defying me?”

“I am protecting you.”

“There are other threats to my life and rule than an Urghul spear in the chest.”