Indomitus Oriens (The Fovean Chronicles) (44 page)

             
It could have been anyone’s fight if Raven had kept her mount under control. Instead she crashed into a shieldman, fell and landed in between Slurn and Nina, before Nina had the opportunity to dispel her energy.

             
The moment she touched Raven, Nina flew like a missile into the backs of the pikemen, limp as a corpse. Jahunga’s Toorians advanced, Jerod with his own troops closing on the other side, but the sergeant proved to be a smarter man, leaping for Raven and taking a handful of her hair at the scalp, dragging her to her feet, his sword at her exposed stomach.

             
“You’ll see her guts,” he said, his shieldmen falling in around him, “if you don’t stand back from me.”

             
Raven reached reflexively for her hair, and he shook her. She knew she couldn’t reach the dagger in her boot. Jerod made an exasperated face and motioned for his men to fall back.

             
No!
Raven swore to herself. She refused to play the helpless girly. She wouldn’t be the damsel in distress. That was Melissa—she was
Raven
.

             
She reached down to the man’s thigh, felt the muscle through the leggings, took a firm grip and said, “Burn!”

             
With everything in her, she yearned for the man to explode into flames. She focused her mind on the burning, the heat, the screaming, the dread, even the smell of cooking meat.

             
She felt the wetness at her side from the edge of the blade at her skin. He kept his sword sharp.

             
But then it fell away, and he stood back from her. She turned to see his hands reaching for his face, the skin blistering, the eyes bulging from his head. He opened his mouth to scream, and flames licked out to singe his upper lip.

             
His eyes exploded, then his skin within his shirt, and he fell. Flame shot in two plumes from his ears, bathing the plains around him in steaming blood and cooked brains.

             
Raven’s hand flew to her mouth as the guilt washed over her. It was horrible, unimaginable, to die that way. She looked for sympathy to those closest to her, and saw the horror on their faces.

             
Wolf Soldiers. One of them transformed before her eyes from shock to rage. She had killed one of them, and now she stood
right there
.

             
“No,” she said, shaking her head. She raised her hand between them and they flinched, fearful of receiving more of what their sergeant had received.

             
Nothing. Then four slow smiles.

             
They had her.

             
“Pain!” she screamed, pointing at the nearest of them. Nothing. He flinched for a moment and then advanced on her, hefting his sword.

             
Slurn swept in once again, quick as a flash, his spear prodding one man’s shield. On the other side of the fight the Men with Jerod advanced, their spears finding Wolf Soldier pikes.

             
Raven’s body had started shaking, full of energy, full of power, like a spring that had been compressed and released, but hadn’t sprung yet. She’d cast a spell and expended her energy, but now she had more, and no way to expel it.

             
Jerod looked her in the eye, the concern plain on his face. The sergeant’s corpse smoldered next to her—it wouldn’t take long before those Wolf Soldiers decided that the sergeant had the right idea—that she was their weakness, after all.

             
No!
She opened her mouth to try another word, but she couldn’t form it. She worked her jaw, trying to overcome something that felt like a dam to her brain, and something else that made her feel like she would throw up.

             
“Are you alright, girl?” Jerod shouted at her. His voice sounded at the same time right in her ear, and a million miles away.

             
“
Girl!
”

             
She couldn’t even tell who said it. She looked to her left, and a bush exploded in flame. Then to her right, where her eyes landed on the back of a Wolf Soldier. The warrior exploded, scorching the land around him, burning pieces of flesh flying out among them, the Man’s terrified scream spooking the horses.

             
Her mind became a wash of red heat and angry flame. Suddenly too large for her body, her awareness fled out over the plains grass, scorching it in a blast pattern that radiated from her. Small creatures, rabbits and birds, flew screaming and burning into the air, fleeing her great wash of flame. Wolf Soldiers bolted from their formation, one after the next exploding in a ball of fire. The Toorians ran after them, even though her magic hadn’t touched them.

She felt it getting away from her, and somehow she knew that, if she lost it, then the flame would eat her, and her friends, and run wild across the plain.
She forced herself envision the flame dying, the smoke fading. Her mind took her from the burning plain to a dark place, quiet and tranquil, and then plunged her into cool, dark nothing.

* * *

              Thorn sat his new mount, an Eldadorian mare with too much spirit and too little stamina, next to Nantar, who’s shed his armor for soft leggings and an open cotton shirt.

             
Nantar rode a gelding. It had that lack of spirit geldings had—Thorn preferred the mare since his own horse had grown too old to campaign, and he hadn’t had the time to go to Andoran for another.

             
He missed his home country. He’d planned to spend the War months with Nantar’s daughters there, but this new plan had come and ruined everything.

             
“You sure you want to wait?” Nantar asked him.

             
He nodded, saying nothing, stewing in his own juices.

             
“How do you like the Eldadorian horse?” Nantar commented.

             
Nantar tried to draw him out. Nantar did that. He kept everyone around him and smiling. Sometimes Thorn expected him to joke with the corpses he made.

             
“It’s not as good as ours,” Thorn commented, peeking out from his melancholy.

             
They led five thousand. They’d marched out on the plains now, spread out in their squads, twenty-five across and twenty deep, with a gap between each as wide as a squad, making them seem four times their already enormous size.

             
Nantar’s Sarandi, Thorn’s scouts, they formed the vanguard for the Free Legionnaires, the fingers and the fist of their army, probing the land before them.

             
Not crushing—they were in Eldador. Supposedly friendly.

             
Thorn kept his eyes on the edge of the horizon. He’d seen some dust—not a lot, but there wouldn’t be this time of year with the ground still wet. Just enough to tell them of the approach, and most would miss it.

             
Not Thorn. No Andaran, no Hunter, would miss something like that.

             
“You should ask for one of Blizzard’s get, I think,” Nantar said.

             
“About time a Daff Kanaar had one,” Thorn agreed, his eyes straining to the horizon.

             
There! Topping the rise between them and the horizon, the flash of his armor. Thorn grinned, and it felt satisfying.

             
“Marked him?” Nantar asked.

             
“Halfway to us,” Thorn said. He shifted on the mare. He didn’t feel comfortable with her. Shela would have a better mount for him, he knew. As Nantar suggested, he’d ask for one of Blizzard’s lot. Shela would understand.

             
“Where?”

             
“He cut between two rises, ahead of his army,” Thorn said. “Look there for the flash of steel from his armor.”

             
Nantar strained to see it. Thorn pointed an outstretched finger, not where the rider hid, but where he soon would be.

             
Sure enough, he saw the flash between two hillocks.

             
“He should have darkened his horse and his armor,” Nantar commented.

             
Thorn shook his head. “He wants to be seen,” the Andaran said. “He wants me to admit I taught him and he learned it.

             
Nantar grinned a big, furry grin. “Well, you
did
teach him.”

             
“Never thought he’d learn it, though,” Thorn answered. The flash came closer now—he would run out of places to hide soon and come at them at a dead run.

             
“He likes to pretend he knows everything already.”

             
“That he does,” Nantar agreed. “Mostly he likes to learn what you teach him and show you what you missed.”

             
Thorn nodded. “I hate it when he does that.”

             
Nantar laughed. “You hate it when it works,” he said. “And you hate it when it works with something you taught him, when you didn’t see it first.”

             
“Well, I see him coming this time,” Thorn said, but he immediately became suspicious. He shouldn’t be seeing this.

             
They heard Blizzard’s challenge, not from before them where the rider approached, but from between them and their army, from a pit in the ground someone had covered with a mat and grass.

             
Lupus leapt from the pit on his horse, rearing and snorting, and then pounded toward them, his lance lowered.

             
Half the squads bolted forward, into the other half that didn’t move without orders. The gelding Nantar rode reared and the mare bobbed her head.

             
He stood before them a moment later, his horned helm on his head and his childish grin on his face underneath it, offset by his cruel scar. Taller than Nantar, he seemed a big child sometimes, and Thorn faulted him regularly for not being serious.

             
“That wasn’t bad,” Nantar commented, reaching forward to clap the shoulder of his armor.

             
“It would have been bad if we had marched into that,” Thorn argued. “And if we had kept marching, we would have.”

             
Lupus shook his head. He still wore the same corrugated Dwarven armor he had on when they met, over a decade earlier. He still rode the same giant stallion, who should be getting too old to ride now but wasn’t.

             
“My men on the other side of that ridge watched you coming. They started forward in time to bring you to a halt,” Lupus said, still grinning. Blizzard stepped closer than most horses would, his instinct just as Thorn remembered it—to intimidate the other horses. It worked, and Thorn had to fight the mare as she tried to withdraw.

             
“I knew you would make me come to you,” Lupus, said, looking directly at Thorn.

             
What could Thorn say? Lupus was right. It was irritating.

             
Nantar just laughed. Nantar always laughed. For a killer, he really had no bad side. As mean as he could be, there was no meanness in him. It made him a good best friend.

             
“How many of you are there?” Lupus asked, serious without notice. He became the Lupus Thorn liked—the man who knew how to make war, who knew the gravity of the world.

             
“Five millennia of Sarandi in the van,” Thorn said. “His warriors and my scouts. Another ten millennia of regulars in the main force, with five more of heavy lancers.”

             
“Veterans?” Lupus pressed him.

             
Veterans were important. Lupus had taught them how to fight in squads, how to turn green men into soldiers in just eight weeks. But you had to mix them with veterans, or they could fall apart. The very worst mix was fifty percent, and usually they kept seventy-five percent.

             
“If we had moved last year as I wanted,” Thorn said, making what he felt had to be the most important point, “we would have had five thousand less but moved with eighty percent veterans. We recruited heavily, but as you know the work for the Volkhydrans against those ogres—”

             
“We’re at fifty-five percent,” Nantar interrupted him, with a sideway glance at Thorn. Thorn scowled and bit the end of his own tongue.

             
“Fifty-five?” he looked out over the troops, struggling back into the rank and file. There would be a few bruises, both to eyes and to egos, as the veterans literally beat the
RIT
back into place.