“If this doesn’t—if we don’t—” Kristos cleared his throat. “I’ve made arrangements for you. Annette is holding back a ship, she’ll meet you at Farrow’s Cove, just south of—”
“Kristos,” I said, shaking my head. “No. You shouldn’t have—we need all the ships.”
“Too late now.” He forced half a smile. “It was a little clipper, not much good for a firefight anyway. But she’ll get you out of the country.”
“That’s not what we promised,” I said with a wry smile. I looked back over the field. The dragoons were readying to deploy. I loosed the charm I held spooled and waiting for my command, settling speed and luck over the dragoons, who began to thunder toward the nearest gun emplacement.
Kristos raised a confused brow. “What did we promise?”
“We promised that we’d all hang together,” I said. Lines of troops advanced onto the field, the complicated game of battle begun. “Now—this is where I have to start paying attention. You go run along and—what are you doing? Commanding a wing or some such?”
Kristos laughed. “Babysitting the artillery wagons.”
I grabbed his hand and squeezed it, briefly, then began the more delicate work of balancing charm and curse at the same time. Soon dark pockets of jet-sparkle shadow engulfed the redoubts still firing on the city, and I drove needles of curse toward the guns themselves, as though I could spike the touchholes of the guns with magic.
I couldn’t, of course—but I could etch the curse into the bronze itself and bury it in the wooden carriages they sat on within the redoubts. They fired, one after the other, and at first I didn’t notice a change in the rhythm. I steadied my breath. I knew that curse and charm, both, were not fail-safe spells, but part of me had expected to see something dramatic immediately, like the curse I had flung at the Royalist navy ship. Then, slowly, guns stopped firing regularly. One crew worked at a misfire; another was suddenly quite invested in getting something unstuck from the gun’s touchhole. A third crew found itself halved by rifle fire. By the time the blockage was cleared in the first gun, another two guns were misfiring, and finally, one cannon ruptured in a burst of smoke and flame.
I allowed myself a small smile—this was a minor victory, but it was helping. Slowly. I held the dark over the remaining artillery battery, and pressed more light toward the dragoons who closed in on a redoubt. The field looked nothing like I would have expected; the large forces were divided into small-scale skirmishes as units converged and clashed, bayonets flashing and every foot of the field fought for and bloodied.
Section by section, foot by foot, the Royalists yielded more and more of the field. We were pressing them back, but they had nowhere to go; the city walls prevented retreat from one direction. From the direction of the river, unseen from my vantage point but ready, a combined regiment of Pellians and Galatines cut off the only other avenue of retreat.
Then an echoing tattoo of drumbeats broke across the field, and I looked toward the sound, holding the strings of my charms and curses like the leashes of unruly dogs. From the forest’s edge, lines of men in Royalist uniforms marched toward the fray. My stomach sank—we thought we were engaging the full force of the Royalists, but they had held what appeared to be a dozen companies in reserve, and now they challenged us, forcing our men to split and fight in both directions at once.
I scanned the lines of advancing Royalists, but I didn’t see any Serafans. I had doubted they could be used here; the fight was too close, too tightly packed together for their casting to influence only one side or another. But behind the advancing Royalists I heard the wan shadow of music. Serafan pipes. The Royalists were marching away from the influence of the musical casting, but they would be fortified with additional luck, courage, and energy for the first vital moments of engagement.
Then, from the thick wall of forest hedge, coarse brambles not thinned by winter, I saw something else. Rose-pink uniforms. The riflemen.
I knew where my attention had to go, what I had to do, even as it turned my stomach. The riflemen were the most dangerous strategy that the Royalists could deploy against us. Trained to pick off officers, dragoons, even the musicians whose drumbeats relayed orders, a few well-placed shots could throw our troops into chaos. Fortunately, their finely tuned rifles took over a minute to load per shot. And that gave me time to work.
With a bracing exhale, I pulled fresh dark magic from the ether, thicker and deeper than I had ever attempted to draw out before. Black, dim, and veined with flashes of jet-like sparkle, it surged with a life of its own, a force unused to being manipulated. Still, it yielded to my direction, and I sent it in wide bands across the field to where the rose-uniformed riflemen were taking their positions along the tree line.
I snipped a length of curse from a band like clipping thread from a spool, and wound it around the first rifleman, then another, then the man next to him, all down the line. The magic fought against constraint, but I pressed it into the fibers of uniforms, holding it fast in wool and linen and felted hats. I forced back revulsion in myself as the curse magic began to affect them, one man clapping a hand to his befuddled head like a caricature of confusion. Yet most of them continued to press on, working their recalcitrant hands on weapons that now seemed to rear against them. One man sliced clean through his thumb with his flint, blood staining his coat cuffs as it poured down his wrist.
I found the next rifle unit, and repeated the process, and again, but it wasn’t enough. The first unit, even cursed, continued working, and the first rifle shots, louder and sharper than the musket fire, echoed over the field, making my heart constrict in my chest. I couldn’t see if they had hit anyone, not yet. But I pulled back to the first unit I had laid curses on, and not only strengthened the magic, but tightened it, sinking it into rifle wood, sinking it deep into cloth until I could feel the resistance of skin and muscle to the invasion of curse magic.
I turned away from the painful horror at what I was doing and pushed deeper.
The first of the riflemen clutched his head in visible pain. His neighbor vomited into the high weeds. Tears streaked my cheeks and nausea rose in my gut, but I continued, tightening the ring of curse around each man, hoping against my own fear that my control was good enough to incapacitate them.
The sharp cracks of the rifles grew sporadic and then disappeared, but I held firm to the darkness, not allowing it to grow any stronger, to siphon any more ill luck out of the ether that could begin to encroach on our own men. I teased it back, thoughts of decaying lilies in cursed water sticking thick in my memory.
Then a shout from behind me, several rapid footfalls, and something broad and solid made contact with the back of my head. I saw black.
51
THE FIRST THING I NOTICED WHEN I WOKE WAS A ROAR OF PAIN, nothing like the needlepoint tapestry of headache after casting too much. I inched a hand up the back of my skull, locating an exquisitely tender egg. I opened my eyes. I was in a tent—no, an officer’s marquee. My fingers closed over the blanket beneath me—fine cashmere, not coarse wool.
“They weren’t supposed to harm you.”
I started, and the pain increased to the point of nausea.
“Help her sit.” The voice was familiar, pale and feminine and elegantly precise. Someone stood beside the bed, and I craned my head carefully to see her. A girl in a pink worsted wool gown and large pinner apron—sturdy hands and sun-browned nose, and certainly not the speaker. She looked at me sympathetically as she offered an arm. I waved her off and struggled upright on my own.