A Practical Guide to Evil

It was as if our armies had played a round of musical chairs.

The Loyalist Legions had been camped at the tip of Moule Hills, south of us, but they’d burned that camp to force us out of our camp in Kala Hills. Then we’d gone around those same hills and stolen a march south of them, taking Kala Fortress and setting up over their supply lines. The final bit of surprise, though, had been when Marshal Nim had marched her army south expel us from our new position and instead been forced to retreat north: Sepulchral’s vanguard had popped up atop Moule Hills, threatening to flank her if she gave battle. So now here we were, the three of us staring at each other as the afternoon sun pounded down on our helmeted heads.

The vanguard set up shop at Nim’s old camp in Moule Hills, in what I could only call a fit of irony. Not without paying for the nice campsite and half-filled dry moat, though, going by the detonations and screams that’d followed the rebel forces moving there. Looked like I’d been right to think that the Black Knight had trapped the area with goblin munitions before leaving it. We were keeping an eye on both the other armies in the region, scouts out and about, but not going on the offensive. The unexpected arrival of Sepulchral’s three thousand had bought us time and we intended to use it to the fullest.

See, even after having outmanoeuvered the Loyalist Legions none of us thought it was anything but stupidity to try to go and attack them in their – formerly our – fortified camp in northern Kala Hills. And given the disparity in our numbers and the fact we’d taken some bruising losses, none of us were particularly eager to face Marshal Nim in a fair pitched battle either. The chances were high that even if we won the costs would make it a strategic defeat. If Juniper had been herself I might have risked it, but as she was… The Hellhound was still largely silent during the war councils she was supposed to be leading.

On the other hand, we couldn’t just let the Black Knight slap us out of our superior position either. We could cut off her supply lines from here and ensure we wouldn’t run out of water. So Sapper-General Pickler had given us our solution.

“We raise a wall,” she said, leaning over the map. “Between Moule Hills and Kala Hills, at the narrowest part of the valley.”

And so while half our army had gone in the rest to shade, the rest had spread out across the valley. Sappers and regulars were digging trenches, going from east to west, while palisades were being raised. Our main camp was still next to Kala Fortress, where we could use the wells and the walls, but out in the valley two makeshift forts were already under construction behind the trench line. The Legions hadn’t taken that lying down, of course. The auxiliary cavalry had come out in force the moment it’d become clear what we were doing, but we’d been waiting and ready. It’d not been lightly armed Levantines facing down the riders, this time, but a proper shield wall with crossbowmen behind it.

After a hard reminder of the difference in range and power between javelins and standard-issue Legion crossbows, the enemy horse had beaten a retreat. They kept harassing us all afternoon, though, even as the Loyalist Legions mounted their answer to our new stratagem. I was standing next to Pickler as it began to play out, sighing.

“We should have seen that coming, really,” I admitted.

She spat to the side.

“They’ll get their fortifications up faster than we will ours,” Pickler warned. “We’re outmatched in both sappers and labour.”

In answer to our containment of them with a trench and wall, the Legions of Terror had begun building their own to our north. Not even that far, damnably enough. About two hundred feet beyond our furthest crossbow range, with their cavalry waiting out in the valley just in case we got foolish enough to try a skirmishing war. Pickler was right, I grimly thought, as she tended to be when it came to sapper’s work. I could already see the gap between the capacity of our armies in action: the Legions had begun working three hours after us yet already they’d caught up to two thirds of our trench length.

“Theirs are more vulnerable,” I noted. “They still have Sepulchral’s three thousand on the wrong side of the walls.”

Which might actually be part of the plan, I thought. The Black Knight would either bait them down from the hills in an ill-advised attack or fortify around them until they became irrelevant. That might explain why she wasn’t being more aggressive in trying to get us off her supply lines. She wasn’t digging in to stay so much as putting up defences to prevent being flanked before she hammered away at us. From her point of view, this battle would be settled long before her stores of food were at any risk of running low.

“I can’t speak to that,” Pickler shrugged. “You know my interest in tactics is limited. What I can tell you, though, is that we’ll need our best skirmishers in Kala Hills tomorrow.”

I had to crane my neck more than I wanted to so I could have a look at her. She was standing on the side of my missing eye. I felt my fingers clench. It was always the little things that got to me.

“Why’s that?” I frowned.

“We don’t have enough stakes to make a wall the length of the entire valley,” she said. “And neither do the Legions. So we’re going to have to cut wood, Catherine, and the only place in the region that has any in the quantity needed-”

“- is Kala Hills,” I finished.

Plenty of brushlands in those rocky hills, some proper trees too. With this having turned into a war of entrenchments, those bushes and trees had just become as precious a commodity as water. We’d begin by cutting the wood closest to our camps, of course, but then they’d need to go south and we would need to go north. Closer to each other.

“The moment we both run out of sudes, the easiest way to slow the other side from building up is to harass the soldiers cutting wood,” I said, rubbing at the bridge of my nose. “Shit. That’s going to get messy.”

“That’s a word for it,” Pickler snorted.

She seemed amused, but her face suddenly stilled. She looked away, biting at the inside of her cheek. A long moment passed, a silence I did not dare to break. I knew whose memory had struck her like a punch in the gut.

“He would have loved it,” Pickler finally said. “The mess. The chaos.”

“The danger,” I ruefully said.

She nodded, then returned to silence. Honest emotion was not something that came easy to goblins, so I let her choose her words at her own pace without sticking my foot in it.

“After Ratface died,” Pickler said, “I thought we were done losing them. That we’d paid our due to the Gobbler, that the rest of us would make it.”

“Nauk,” I quietly said.

“He was gone long before they killed him,” she said, shaking her head. “The Warlock… didn’t bring much of him back. Not enough for it to count.”

I did not disagree, keeping my shame to myself. I’d thought, once upon a time, that Night might have mended that. These days I was not so sure, but I had clutched that hope close in the early days of my return from the Everdark.

“Then they got Hune,” Pickler continued. “That was…”

“I didn’t think you two were close,” I said.

“We weren’t. She wasn’t the kind that made friends. But she was one of us, Cat,” the goblin quietly said.

Over the years, somewhere along the line the veil that’d once separated the Rat Company cadets from the Fifteenth had fallen. There just weren’t enough of us left for the distinction to matter. With every fresh war I dragged us into, every hard stand, another body had dropped. We were a dying breed, those few that’d been in it from the start.

“She was,” I acknowledged.

Hune had not been my friend and I had never trusted her entirely. But she had been one of us anyway, in that intangible way they only ever quite became real when it started feeling like loss.

“And somehow I still didn’t see it coming when Robber died,” Pickler said, tone bitter. “He used to go around telling us he was invincible, that he just couldn’t seem to croak-”

My throat tightened and she stopped herself, looking at the men raising walls in the distance.

“I guess I believed him a little, even when I rolled my eyes. I thought that even if we all died, Catherine, he’d be the last one to bite it,” she said. “Somehow. It just never felt real that he could be… gone.”

“Sometimes I still feel like he’ll pop out from behind a stone,” I admitted. “Grinning, making fun of us for having gone soft.”

“But he won’t,” Pickler harshly said. “He won’t. And there’s so many things with him I left half done, because I always thought there’d be more time. After this battle, that plan, that book. I waited until the Gobbler took him because I was too… lazy to talk to him.”

“We always think we could have done more, when people die,” I said. “Especially people we loved. It’s not fair to either them or us.”

“What does fair ever matter?” Pickler tiredly said. ‘’It won’t fix a thing. It’s not wood and steel, I can’t take out what’s broken and make good again. Instead what I have is regrets and a letter I’m too afraid to open.”

I breathed in sharply. Hakram had told me Robber had left her a letter, but I’d not known she had yet to read it.

“Why?”

“I know what’s in it,” Pickler said, then snorted. “Or maybe I don’t. I don’t know which scares me more.”

Robber had loved her, once. When we’d been little more than children he and Nauk had both courted her attentions and fancied each other rivals, not that anything ever came of it save bickering. She’d liked the attention, but she’d never been all that interested in romance. Besides, goblins thought of love differently than humans. It didn’t mean the same things, didn’t carry the same expectations even when it was returned.

“Did you love him?” I quietly asked.

Hesitation.

“No,” Pickler replied.

Then she chuckled bitterly.

“Maybe,” she admitted. “It was… messy. I thought he’d want more than I wanted to give, so I never let him ask.”

I breathed out, hand itching for my pipe. I restrained myself.

“I think you did,” I murmured. “At least a little.”

Her shoulders tightened.

“After the war,” Pickler finally said, “I wanted us to go to the same place.”

It was as close to admitting affection as she would ever get, I thought.

“I expect we all will, Pickler,” I softly said. “He’s just gone on ahead one more time.”

She laughed, a little grimly but genuinely. Goblin humour tended to run even darker than my people’s. There was a reason they got on so well with Lycaonese, whose gallows humour was black enough even Callowans balked at it.

“It feels like unfinished business,” Pickler eventually said. “That’s all. And I don’t know how to finish it.”

Sometimes you don’t, I thought. You keep walking with that weight on your back, knowing one day you’ll buckle. My instinct was to lay a hand on her shoulder in comfort, but it would be no such thing to a goblin. Instead I gave her the sole courtesy I had to offer: work to disappear into.

“Prepare our builders for skirmish,” I said. “Draw on our reserves for regulars if you need to.”

“You’re going to hiss at the snake?” Pickler asked, sounding surprised.

Poke at the bear, I decided, only for the Grey Eyries. It always surprised me that even after all these years there were still expressions from east of the Wasaliti I’d never heard. In Lower Miezan, anyway.

“Something like that,” I said. “I figure that we’ve got one asset the Legions have no answer to, so it’s about time to use it.”

I wasn’t going to be sending skirmishers out to fight theirs in the space between our trenches, I wasn’t that much of a fool. They had crossbow companies waiting for that mistake, same as us, and my men were a lot more tired than Nim’s anyway. The Army of Callow had marched all night and not had a full eight hours of sleep since, it was on the ragged edge. Instead I sent for two people: Archer and the Silver Huntress. My instructions were straightforward.

“You see these people?” I asked, pointing north.

The two of them eyed the enemy legionaries and sappers raising a wall and digging a trench, a swarm of ants just outside the range of our crossbows.

“Sure,” Archer shrugged.

“I do,” the Silver Huntress gravely replied.

“You’ve got bows and I want corpses,” I bluntly said. “Have at it.”

That got a delighted laugh out of Indrani and a measuring look out of Alexis. Neither of them bothered to use the elaborate bows they’d received as gifts from the Lady of the Lake, instead stringing good yew longbows from Daoine after ensuring they were well provisioned with arrows.

And then, easy as breathing, they began taking lives.

The enemy were maybe seventeen hundred feet away, well out the range of even the longbowmen of the Watch. But these two were Named, sharpened to a razor’s edge in the greatest war of our time, and so they began killing their way through the enemy as if were not impossible. Archer went for officers, Huntress for the sappers. It took a while before the enemy even realized what was happening: they scrambled about looking for skirmishers that weren’t there, at first. And even when they did realize, the response was slow. Archer had killed the people who should be shouting orders. Within half an hour the regulars were in a full testudo and sappers were either huddling in their trench or gone.

At the hour’s turn the sappers came back having assembled rough mantlets, wooden walls on wheels they could bring forward and take cover behind. It was a mixed success: the two archer Named first bled the regulars that broke cover to put them in place and then ignored them entirely, curving their arrows to fall down from above. Those shots weren’t anywhere as lethal, but they still disrupted the sappers trying to get back to work. It was only half an hour after that the situation came to a close, when mage lines were sent out to raise shield spells around the sappers to protect them entirely. In the distance I recognize the woman who led them. Tall, dark of hair and with strange golden eyes. Akua looked our way as well, but nothing was spoken.

It was still too early.

“We could have at the mages,” the Silver Huntress said. “If we start using our proper bows and our stock of mage-killing arrows.”

I shook my head. I might have considered it if they were mfuasa and nobles, but these were Legion mages. We did not have enough mage-killer arrows for this to be a good trade.

“Better to let them win now,” I said. “Let them feel safe and get sloppy.”

Indrani eyed me amusedly.

“You’re sending us back after nightfall,” she said.

My smile was cold.

“Get some rest, you two,” I said. “You have a long night ahead of you.”

And I needed to get back to camp. The fortifications were a good measure to take, Pickler had been right to suggest them, but they weren’t a plan.

If we were going to win this, we needed one of those.

Vivienne wasn’t alone in her tent when I went to see her. I’d been about to enter anyway when I overheard the voice of who she was speaking with. The Laure drawl wasn’t rare in my army, but I knew the timbre of that voice too. I was curious enough about what had brought the Squire to her that I decided to… actively overhear. It wasn’t called eavesdropping when it was a queen that did it, there were laws about this stuff.

“-did a number on him,” Vivienne was saying. “I know there are parts of Callow where he still has a good reputation, but they tend to be the ones that saw little of him.”

“He was chosen by a Choir, I am told,” Arthur hesitantly said. “Can that truly be a harmful thing?”

“Angels are a lot of things,” Vivienne said. “Most of them are good. But do not ever, for a moment, believe them to be harmless. Even their kindness has teeth, and Contrition has little other than the teeth to offer.”

“Yet you fought with him,” the Squire said, voice daring her to deny it. “At his side.”

“Some of the things we did back then were right,” Vivienne said, tone gone quiet. “But some of the others… we weren’t fighting the right battles, and not against the right people. Doing good’s not always the same thing as doing Good.”

“There’s priests who would call that heresy,” he said.

“Heard lot of that talk, when I was your age,” Vivienne said, and I could hear the hard smile in her voice. “Heresy this, blasphemy that. What did the Praesi care? Wasn’t priests whining that got the Empire to leave. Keep to Above of you want, there’s nothing wrong with that. But like Jehan the Wise said, prayer and a sword work better than prayer alone.”

A sentiment I could get behind. The sword part of it, anyway. Deciding I’d eavesdrop- actively overheard for long enough, I made my presence known by loudly approaching. Fuck, I thought as I entered the tent, but someone was going to have to teach the kid to hide his thoughts better. He looked like I’d just caught him with his hand in a honey pot, it was painfully obvious he thought he’d been doing something bad. I wasn’t too worried about talk of the Lone Swordsman, myself. Contrition had been trying to hook the Squire from the start, but William was not a great angle for them to take. A lot of Callowans hadn’t been fond of the man.

That tended to happen when you carved messages into people’s foreheads, even when those people were Praesi.

“If you’d excuse me, Your Grace, Your Majesty,” Arthur said, bowing.

I shrugged and Vivienne waved him away. She waited until he was gone from the tent to cock an eyebrow at me.

“So how much did you listen at?”

I put a hand over my heart, deeply wounded by the implication.

“How dare you,” I gravely said, “and when you started talking about the way people remember William.”

“The end, then,” Vivienne said. “Kid’s been dreaming, but they’re all over the place.”

I frowned.

“Still the broken sword?”

I’d broken the Penitent’s Blade and good luck to anyone trying to – no, Catherine, that was a good way to get stabbed with pointed irony in a few years. Let it simply be said I had been thorough in dispersing the shards of the angel’s feather.

“He has a whole array of them,” Viv replied, shaking her head. “Different Squires. He does get the sword dreams, but I’d bet that’s Contrition trying to nudge him down that road.”

“Those nosy fuckers,” I grunted. “They need to learn when to quit.”

I wasn’t above asking Zeze to look into the practicalities of a pointed lesson for those vultures when this was all over. Malicia and Amadeus had outlawed the Name of Chancellor, when she climbed the Tower, so maybe I should look into outlawing the Hashmallim getting their sticky fingers into any of my countrymen.

“He’s not like William was,” Vivienne frankly said. “Nowhere enough self-loathing. I imagine they’d like him on the throne instead of you or me, but he’s a lot more interested in knighthood than crowns. That bodes well.”

“He’s still a wild card,” I said. “Different Squire dreams means he’s not settled, Viv. No telling what kind of a Knight Name he’ll end up transitioning into.”

It sounded a lot to me like the Heavens dangling shiny paths in front of their newest Callowan hero to find out what might stick. And there were some that I simply wouldn’t be able to tolerate. Rebel Knight, for one, Eleanor Fairfax’s old Name that’d popped up in Callowan history whenever a tyrant needed toppling. It irked me how much Name lore about the days of the Old Kingdom had been lost. I understood why my father had destroyed pretty much all he could – legacies were dangerous things when you’d destroyed the last iteration of them – but it still left me more knowledgeable in the ways of Praesi Named than those of my own kingdom.

Maybe it was for the best, I told myself. Using old tools and old means tended to lead to the same old ends.

“Lots of that going around,” Vivienne admitted. “Yours is so close I can almost taste it, Cat. You’re already starting to get the coincidences again – what were the odds of you stumbling into this talk?”

Low, practically speaking.

“I think it’ll take shape when we settle the Tower,” I admitted.

I’d know for sure if I started getting the reflexes again.

“You’re not far either,” I said. “Or he wouldn’t have been having that talk with you in the first place.”

She grimaced.

“I’m not sure what it is,” Vivienne said. “And there’s… something missing, I can’t quite put it into words.”

“You need something to take you over the top,” I said, tone clinical. “You’ve got your Role and the will, but you need weight. A story that people will talk about.”

That famous charge at the Battle of Hainaut had not been quite enough.

“I thought you might be angry,” she admitted. “I know you wanted Callow to be ruled by someone without a Name.”

I sighed.

“Those provisions of the Accords are essentially dead,” I said. “And in the end it’s not a theoretical candidate I’m entrusting that throne to, it’s Vivienne Dartwick. I stand by that choice whether it comes with a Name attached or not.”

Her eyes shone and I looked to the side.

“Thanks,” Vivienne quietly said.

I cleared my throat uncomfortably.

“I did come for something,” I said. “Your scheme in the Legions?”

“Won’t work if it looks like we’re losing,” she replied. “I’m still looking into getting in contact. It’s ready, I just need my foot in the door.”

“Hurry it up,” I asked. “I’m not sure we’ll be getting a decisive battle before Sepulchral arrives. If the rest of her army arrives in time, I want our finger ready to pull the trigger.”

“I’ll see it done,” she firmly replied.

I nodded. I was about to take my leave when I saw hesitation on her face.

“Viv?”

She brushed back an errant strand that’d fallen out of her braid. It still looked like a crown, her milkmaid’s braid, even when she did not wear the silver circlet that’d become hers when I formally named her a princess of Callow. She bit her lip.

“The Name,” Vivienne quietly said, “I do not know if it will be…”

She trailed off, hesitating again.

“I don’t think it will be one of Below’s,” she said. “Cat, I know that-”

I limped forward a step, leaning over the desk, and even as her eyes widened in surprise I pressed a kiss against her forehead. She looked up, startled, as I drew back.

“I didn’t name you my successor so you could keep making my mistakes,” I said.

There was nothing more to say, as far as I was concerned, and so on those words I left her.

Staff Tribune Aisha Bishara still brewed what was probably my favourite tea in the world. Herbal Wasteland stuff, nothing like the horrid imported leaves that Hasenbach was so wild about, and I’d yet to ever dislike a mug she’d made me. Not that the pleasant taste made what we had to talk about any more pleasant.

“I’ve never seen her like this before,” Aisha said. “In her first year at the College she had moments, before she found her footing, but this is different.”

I grimaced.

“I didn’t see it coming,” I admitted. “I know Nim pulling one over us twice in a row had to be a shock, but we’ve had hard rides before. What makes this different?”

Aisha elegantly sipped at her tea, which was the polite Taghreb way of gathering’s one’s thoughts without being uncouth.

“It has been coming for some time, I think,” Aisha finally said. “Looking back now. But I am afraid that the tipping point would be you.”

I froze in my seat a moment, taken aback.

“I thought I’d made it clear I still had full trust in her abilities,” I slowly said.

“Yes,” Aisha gently said. “Which made it sting all the more when she failed your trust by being defeated so starkly.”

Fuck, I eloquently thought. Had I been turning the knife without even realizing it?

“She said things, after you left,” I began, hesitant to continue.

“She’s afraid it didn’t all come back,” Aisha murmured. “Yes, she has confided as much in me before.”

“The Grey Pilgrim himself said she was all there,” I told her. “It wrecked her body to extract the commands, the hooks were deep, but the weakness is purely physical.”

“You trusted the man, which weighs on the scales, but not all of us are eager to take the word of the Peregrine for anything at all,” she replied. “It is doubts, Catherine. She believes she was either lessened by Malicia’s spells or never on even footing with the Empire’s marshal, and cannot believe in either without loathing.”

Aisha sighed and then, for one of the few times in all the years I’d known her, slumped into her seat.

“And she loathes the indecision too,” she continued, “which makes even standing still a defeat. It is… tangled, Catherine. And perhaps this was a long time coming. We all rose swiftly under you. Some might say too quickly.”

I sipped at my tea.

“I’m not one of those people,” I said. “And unless someone else has taken to wearing my crown, that’s the only trust in need of keeping.”

She met my eye, then slowly nodded. Aisha had always been hard to read, her lovely heart-shaped face ever showing anything she did not want it to.

“I am proud, you know,” Aisha quietly said. “Of the army we built, all of us. The kingdom. It was bitter and often thankless work, Catherine, but you did not pretend otherwise when you asked us to follow you. And looking at all we have done, even after all it cost us, I am deeply proud.”

She slid a finger around the rim of her cup.

“I would not let that legacy bury us,” Aisha said. “Juniper… if she fails you here, it will haunt her to her grave.”

“I don’t know how to make her eager for the fight again,” I admitted.

I’d never had to, before. Never learned to.

“I might,” she said. “I looked through her papers as she slept.”

My eye narrowed but I did not interrupt.

“She has been sketching out theories,” Aisha said. “And one stood out. I would have us show her, Catherine, that she is not blind and lost.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

And we planned, the two of us, how to follow the plan my Marshal hadn’t given me.

For a bit, it looked like we’d accidentally started a night battle.

Archer and Huntress had come out to reap another harvest of lives, but when they began shooting at the legionaries sleeping in forts exactly like those we’d raised – it was the same damned pattern both sides used – it looked like we’d kicked a hornet’s nest. Not only did goblins and regulars come out in force, but so did a large force we hadn’t anticipated. The entire Eighth Legion had left the camp in Kala Hills and begun marching towards the trenches. Our watches and horns did their job properly, calling for a brisk assembly, but it was clear that we’d not get to our fortifications in force before the enemy did. Not that it mattered, I thought, because the Eighth wasn’t actually there to attack us. Juniper had believed it would be two legions, but she’d written that a delaying force at least one strong would march our way.

Now there were two more of her predictions left to come true.

The first came true within a quarter bell. In perfect marching order, the Eleventh and Fourteenth Legion crossed the valley to begin an assault on the camp in Moule Hills where Sepulchral’s vanguard was now beginning to wake in a panic. Eight thousand legionaries marching against the three thousand mixed force of household troops and cavalry. If the Black Knight closed in before they were ready, and she would, it would be a slaughter. I was rather proud of how quickly the Army of Callow began gathering in the valley facing the Legions. By the time the Eighth finished living up to their cognomen of Trailblazers and took over the Legion fortifications facing ours, our own vanguard of three thousand was on its way to our side of the trenches.

“I think we took them by surprise with the harassment by Archer and Huntress,” I mused. “At a guess, because of the dark they thought it was an attack on their position.”

“Then why did the Eighth march out so quickly?” Vivienne asked with a frown.

“Dedicated response force,” I said. “Nim had them waiting for something like this. Which is why there’s only one other legion marching to reinforce them.”

I pointed in the distance, where the Thirteenth was marching to bolster the Eighth in their defensive position. The Black Knight’s own legion, the Seventh, was staying back. Serving as a reserve, most likely.

“And now the Legions gamble on our being too slow to stop them from wiping out the Askum troops,” Vivienne muttered. “Isn’t Marshal Nim afraid we’ll overwhelm the eight thousand she’s putting in our way? Sepulchral sent household troops, not the sort of men who die quickly. If we gather enough soldiers here, we could break the two legions in our way and perhaps even defeat her army while it’s divided.”

“Good instinct,” I praised. “She’s very much afraid of that. It’s why she’s kept her own legion as a reserve, it keeps her options open. That way she can either use the Seventh to shore up the defences in the valley or to give second breath to the assault on Sepulchral should it stall out.”

“It still seems risky, especially trying it at night,” Vivienne said. “What if we gather quicker than she anticipated?”

“Here’s where it gets interesting,” I mused. “See, what we sent to reinforce our trench was our readied troops. Night watch, soldiers on duty. It was a pretty solid number for an army our size. But the second wave of our soldiers is going to come slower. They’ll need to wake, put on armour, find their officers and muster before marching out. There’s going to be a beat between the two waves.”

“So she attacks us when she still has more soldiers on the fronts than we do?” Vivienne guessed.

“That’d be a blunder,” I said. “If she tries to overwhelm our trenches, she risks our people holding and her men being out of formation when our second wave does arrive. That could go really badly for her, the kind of disaster you were talking about earlier.”

“So what does she do?” the sole princess of Callow asked. “Why are we here, Catherine?”

“Because the Hellhound believes that Marshal Nim is going to make use of that beat between the waves,” I said. “Not to overwhelm our position in the valley, no, but to delay the reinforcements. To make sure that we can’t threaten to overwhelm her position in the valley while she deals with the Askum camp.”

“And how would she do that?” Vivienne asked.

I wasn’t the one who answered her. It was, instead, the thunder of thousands of hooves against the half-road. Three thousand auxiliary horse rode down the sole road of the valley, well to the west of the standoff between the Eighth and our vanguard. They weren’t heading there in slightest, after all: they were going to continue doing the road before taking a brisk turn east towards Kala Fortress, to strike at my soldiers before they could properly form up into a second wave. They’d retreat soon enough, light horse couldn’t handle the Army of Callow in a lasting fight, but all they had to do was sow enough chaos and death to slow us down before running away.

It would buy the Black Knight long enough to do achieve what she was after, removing Sepulchral’s vanguard from the board.

Of course, there was just one little bit of trouble with that. Three thousand light cavalry, packed in a tight column so they could make the best use possible of the road, were a fearsome force. But also a fragile one. So I wanted until they were in deep, too late to easily leave, and then I turned to Grandmaster Brandon Talbot. He’d been waiting all this time, listening with an eager look on his face.

“I’m going to pull down the veil,” I said. “Ready?”

“At your word, Your Majesty,” he replied.

It’d been a pain to get Masego to anchor the Night-working in a stone and meant it had been a pretty basic illusion, but it’d allowed me to get around that little trick of Akua’s with the red light circle. The Legions had gotten too dependent on that for sniffing me out, they really ought to have known better. With a murmured prayer I tore the Night out of the stone, feeling it crumbled to dust in my hand, and suddenly the moon shone pale above the glinting ranks of the Order of the Broken Bells. Lances down, shields up, the knights were in broad flanking positions just ahead of the largest cavalry force left in the Wasteland. I glanced at Vivienne, grinning and gesturing at our foes. She grinned back.

“KNIGHTS OF CALLOW,” she shouted. “FORWARD!”

Once, twice, thrice the horn sounded.

Death followed.