Valyn had watched, gut tight, as il Tornja rode down the muddy street, guards behind and before him. It was tempting to take the shot then. To kill the general in the midst of so much swirling chaos seemed almost trivial, and Valyn went so far as to level the wound-up flatbow and sight in on the man’s forehead. It was Laith who stopped him. Laith and Gwenna and Talal. As far as Valyn knew, all three of them were dead somewhere in the twisted wreckage, all to hold back the Urghul. Finishing the battle was il Tornja’s job, and Valyn would be shipped to ’Shael before he undercut his Wing’s sacrifice. He eased his finger off the trigger. Adare said the man was a genius, and judging from the madness below he was going to need to be.

For most of the morning, Valyn lay still, hidden on the roof of the tower just a few feet from the kenarang, listening as he wove his inscrutable web. Despite a lifetime of military training, most of the orders made no sense at all to Valyn. Il Tornja abandoned points he could have held and held points he should have abandoned. He would send a runner with one message, then, moments later, contradict it with another runner or a signal arrow. He sent directives to let cornered Urghul escape, and more than once he gave direct orders that led to the capture of his own soldiers. And he killed men, killed them by the scores and by the hundreds, sacrificing entire units to Urghul traps that he could see clearly from the rooftops, sending men into fights they couldn’t possibly win, demanding that they hold positions they couldn’t possibly hold. It was insanity, utter insanity. And it worked.

Valyn had no idea how, but as the sun labored steadily higher, the Annurians began to win. There was no single victory that could account for it, no stunning charge or heroic stand. At least, not if you ignored the circle of death that surrounded Annick and Pyrre for hour after hour until they were pressed back behind a building and Valyn lost sight of them. In fact, he was hard-pressed to make any sense at all of the individual scenes of brutality and suffering playing out below.

He could, however, see the larger pattern as it emerged. The Annurians were pushing back the Urghul. Nothing startled the kenarang, nothing shocked him. Not the collapse of an entire company of archers, not the Urghul pressing up against the tower itself, not even Adare’s unexpected arrival on the tower roof. Valyn tried to catch the man’s smell. The world was awash in mud and blood and terror, but from il Tornja—nothing. He smelled like stone. Like snow. Like emptiness.