YSABELLE
Lord
Rhovan, dressed for battle, sat his charger in the brittle chill of
spring dawn. His ceramic alloy plate was a deep, dark red and his
snorting, ill-tempered mount was the color of blood. He wore a
pistol at his left hip and across his knees was a long-handled
warhammer heavy enough to smash a knight's ceramic breastplate into
his lungs. It reminded Ysabelle of Fyodor's hammer, that Eye-stained
thing with its broken stone head and splintery handle. Sieur Boris
sat beside his liege with the manticore banner flying from his
ceremonial pike.
Lord
Rhossart was too fat for armor; he wore a fur-trimmed coat over his
red suit and orange vest. His mount was a placid, stocky mare.
Vitali had gone south to pledge the allegiance of the Northern
Provinces to Sofia's cause, but the rest of Lord Rhovan's family and
client lords were with him on the field. Lord Renfield Urquhart,
Lady Bazhukov with her gimlet eyes and massive shoulders, Sieur
Simeon Yarinoff, and the pitiless Harkov triplets who ruled their
lands jointly. Them and their families, those who'd been knighted
and blooded. A few northern priests, Fyodor among them, walked
alongside the horses in their bearskin cloaks and old-fashioned
armor.
The
town of Cold Fords lay at their back, and before them were the three
frozen rivers that gave it its name. A mile away on the near bank
were arrayed the legions of Sieur Siegfried Ramm, the man everyone
said had killed King Luke on the night of Lord Saul's and little
Rhossart's deaths. Half of us are gone, thought
Ysabelle. Now they said her aunt, still Anaias's vassal, had been
crushed by the Blackwalls beneath the walls of Valsir. Ysard's
brother had died in that city. I never want to see it
again. Not if I live to be a hundred.
Ysard,
her cousin and protector, rode beside her in the thick of Lord
Rhovan's command. He wore no armor and stubble darkened his once
clean-shaven jaw. His green stormcoat was rumpled and soiled, his
shirt collar yellow with sweat. The long yellow scarf he wore was
stained with dark blotches of wine, unless it was blood. He'd spent
much of his time in Cold Fords at the pubs and wine sinks, drowning
his brother Yannis's memory in cheap liquor. They were
close, she remembered from their
visits. Hardly away from each other.
On Ysabelle's other side Master Drusus cut a cleaner figure in his
black suit, good winter coat, and flashing spectacles. He'd found a
round fur hat somewhere to cover his balding head.
Across
the mile-wide no-man's land between armies, another command prepared
itself to treat with Rhovan's. The gilded armor of the Knights
Corpus flashed in the wintery sunlight. Atticus Cloyt, the radical
scholar who'd founded Mule's Point University, had disparaged the
Knights Corpus as a bad joke on the legacy of the Knights of the
Branch, but Sieur Siegfried and his cronies looked
impressive enough. We
outnumber them, though. Her
father's captain of the guard, Sieur Bowman Grant, had taught her how
to take a rough account of a legion's strength by its standards and
formations. At least forty thousand of them. Two full
legions to our three and change.
A hush
full over the assembled nobility. Lord Rhovan looked out over the
tundra to where Ramm's escort had formed an honor guard around him.
“Now,” he said, and heeled his horse forward.
They
advanced, thirty-odd men and women in fur, wool, kevlar, and
ballistic plate. Ysabelle urged her pony after them. It felt
strange. Wrong. What am I doing here? It should be my father,
or my aunt. Except she's on the other side of the war.
Closer,
Ysabelle recognized most of Sieur Siegfried's men from court. There
was squat, squinty Geoffrey Vanciber, there Abram Reincrow and his
sister Lethe, and beside them the barrel-chested figure of Sieur
Robert Rath. A few collegiate sorcerers with shaved heads and red
robes trimmed in golden vair rode beside Sieur Siegfried, while
behind him rode a tall, hooded figure in a brown cloak that hid his
face. The knight himself was tall, his dirty-blond hair windblown
and messy, his blue eyes lively. He smiled as the two groups drew
near one another.
“Lord
Rhovan,” said the traitor knight, flashing his charming grin as he
pulled back on his golden stallion's reins. The horse halted with a
snort. “It doesn't look as though you've come to dip your banners
to the King. Are we going to have a tiff in front of the children?”
“Surrender
or die, regicide.” Lord Rhovan's scowl was black as a thunderhead.
“The north knows no monarch but Sofia Rassianus.”
“And
yet,” said Sieur Siegfried, “you've spent thirty years doing an
excellent impression of a province that recognized Luke Kvalus as its
king and sovereign.”
Rhovan's
face tightened. His knights had murder in their eyes and their hands
were on the butts of their guns, the hilts of their swords.
Ysabelle's pony whinnied and stepped back, shying from the violence
in the air. She glanced left at where Fyodor stood with his
hard-faced brothers. The priest was frowning at Lady Bazhukov, who
sat brooding in her saddle with her sword half-drawn.
“I
offer your men the chance to take up valorous arms,” said Lord
Rhovan through clenched teeth. “You'll face trial for your crimes
once Rassian is taken.”
Sieur
Siegfried looked unimpressed. “Well then,” he said, “I suppose
that's that. Vitali?”
The
brown-cloaked man threw back his hood. Lord Rhovan gaped,
speechless, at his son.
Vitali?
But he went south to meet the Queen's armies. Ysabelle's
heart was a frozen lump of stone inside her breast. He
can't be here.
Lady Bazhukov's sword took Lord Rhovan's head off in a spray of
blood. Red droplets struck Ysabelle's sleeve and her mount's flank.
The pony spooked and broke into a gallop as Sieur Boris turned his
mount, his bearded face bloodless, and was cut down in a hail of
bullets. The two armies stood silent and dark against the snowy
plain, their breath misting before them, as in the dead white space
between their ranks the two honor guards came together in a bloody
tangle. A few of the northerners tried to break for freedom, but
sorcerous fire engulfed them as they fled. Lord Rhossart was
shouting for his sword when two men dragged him from his horse.
Ysabelle
saw Master Drusus slump in his saddle, then fall to the ground. She
saw Ysard dueling Sieur Geoffrey until another of the Knights Corpus
rode up and shot her cousin through the heart, then again in the
head. She twisted, thumping her heels against her pony's heaving
flanks, but the animal just plunged on through the brittle snow. I'm
going to die, she thought as an
Imperial sorcerer met her eyes across the churned expanse. I
don't know enough to stop him.
He
was theatrical. There was no burst of flame, no thunder of
phantasmal guns. Instead a great bear of hoarfrost, snow, and frozen
dirt heaved itself up out of the ground and lunged at Ysabelle and
her pony with a roar like rotten ice breaking. The pony screamed as
icy claws raked its rump. The bear shambled after them. No,
thought Ysabelle. No.
This is ridiculous. She opened
her Second Eye, swallowing the bile it brought to her throat.
There
is no bear. Snow doesn't live.
The
construct collapsed mid-lunge, its feeble ideation unable to stand up
to sorcerous scrutiny. Ysabelle laughed out loud, fury and grief
forgotten in that golden moment. Then something heavy hit her in the
stomach. She grunted, doubling over, and saw blood in her spit as it
dribbled onto the pommel of her saddle. The snow raced by beneath
her. My womb, she
thought sadly. Her glove, pressed to her belly, came away red with
blood. The world was fuzzing around the edges, and what sounds she
could still hear were screams and the thunder of hooves.
She
turned, her head spinning, and saw a knight on horseback pounding
toward her, a rifle in his hands. He shouted something and then
sparks flared around his flying hair and he went up like an oily rag.
His horse had just started to burn when the world ran together and
dribbled down into a deep, black hole, and then there was nothing
left at all.
