Instead, on orders given, and with the rising sun behind many of them, the archers of Ferrieres began loosing their arrows at the Anglcyn infantry and archers in the meadow. No one rode forward. No one.

It was, though the constable could not know it, exactly what Hardan’s force had done the day before to the Maiden’s army. Irony is for afterwards in war. Killing is the thing of the moment.

The Anglcyn had a tactic, the same one the army of Ferrieres was using now, whereby foot soldiers held up shields to screen themselves and the archers. For de Vaux’s force, the trees helped, too; he had most of his bowmen stay at the edges. Hardan had not expected this at all, and it took time, and some difficulty, to realign his forces to offer proper protection to their own bowmen, and many men were, in fact, already dead or wounded by then, both archers and infantry.

The sucking mud of the meadow, chosen to slow and trap the reckless cavalry of Ferrieres, took its toll, instead, on the army of Angland that day.

The sun shone throughout, pale and bright, rising, then overhead. The arrows kept flying, from both armies, but to far, far greater effect against those in the open meadow. Trapped in the trap they’d thought to have laid.

It was named Azingar, that place, after the village just to the west of it, south of the walled city of Calienne. It entered the history and legends of a country. Azingar. It was where the Maiden was foully burned by the Anglcyn, then they themselves, their king mastered by the brilliant new constable of Ferrieres, were destroyed in the cause of freedom. And in vengeance for Jeanette.

The cavalry of Ferrieres advanced, not hurrying, only when the army in the meadow had been so diminished that the assault was almost too easy. Anglcyn archers and infantry threw down their bows and pikes and swords to surrender.

They were not allowed to do that.

They were slain, most of them.

A handful of the Anglcyn lords were permitted to yield. Ransoms were important. Ordinary soldiers—archers and foot soldiers, some of the horsemen—they could be killed, they didn’t matter. Dukes and counts did. It was the way of things. The man who captured an important figure could negotiate for and claim his prisoner’s ransom for himself. With luck, you could make your fortune.

King Hardan had looked as if he’d wanted to fight to a warrior’s death in that churned, trampled meadow. He was not permitted that, either. On the constable’s order, he was wounded in the right shoulder by an arrow, not by a nobleman’s sword. His own sword fell, then, and was claimed. He himself was seized—by ordinary soldiers. They were not courteous.