Antaup grinned as he flicked that loose lock of hair out of his face and it dropped straight back. “Yes, Your Grace!”
“Let the Anglanders know!” And Leo sent Antaup charging down the hill with a slap on the back. “Greenway?”
He slouched over, giving a mockery of a Union salute. “Young Lion.”
“Tell Stour we’re attacking from right across to left. He goes last.”
“Last?” sneered Greenway.
“It’s a battle plan, not a race.”
“Don’t reckon Stour’ll like going—”
Leo grabbed a fistful of Greenway’s cloak and snarled the words in his face. “He doesn’t have to like it. He just has to do it.” And he shoved the man away and made him slither on the dewy grass. He only just righted himself before he fell, and slunk off with bad grace.
“Might not be wise to treat him with so little respect,” murmured Jin.
“I had a go at being wise,” snapped Leo. “It doesn’t fucking suit me.”
Jin laughed and thumped him on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit!”
Leo looked towards the low ridge, the high bluff, the town with the crescent of diggings in front, a fierce smile on his face. He liked this plan. Simple. Aggressive. It played to his strengths. He wished he’d done it last night, but last night wasn’t coming back. They were ready now and had the whole day ahead of them. He felt like a new man.
“We could’ve beaten him last night.” He curled his fingers into a trembling fist. “But we’ll crush him today instead. Someone get my horse!”
Fools’ Errands
Orso stood at the parapet of Stoffenbeck’s clock tower, trying to frown out manfully to the north while feeling like an utter impostor in his gilded armour.
The mist clinging to the fields was clearing, the sun rising bright into a sky holding only a few lonely puffs of cloud. A rather lovely day might have been in the offing. Had it not been for the thousands of heavily armed men poised to murder each other within the next few hours, of course.
The forces of the Open Council were gathered on the far left. Yellow blocks, red blobs, blue wedges, bright flags streaming overhead. Their wondrous variety suggested a lack of coordination, but also spoke strongly to the breadth of the coalition against him.
The army of Angland was deployed below the hill on which Steebling’s tower-house stood. Dark, business-like blocks so ominously neat they might have been drawn with a ruler. Men who last year had been heroes, struggling against the Union’s enemies. Men Orso had done his best to help. Men he had utterly failed to help, driven now to open rebellion against him.
Of Stour Nightfall’s Northmen there was no sign. Lurking in the woods, no doubt, waiting to pounce, as Northmen so loved to do. The Young Lion and the Great Wolf had been bitter enemies, fighting each other to the death but a few months before. Now Orso had achieved the apparently impossible and united them in mutual hatred for him.
By the Fates, when did he get so many enemies?
“I tried to do the right thing,” he murmured, striving to make sense of it. “Broadly. The best I could, under the circumstances. Tried to find… reasonable compromises?” It would have made a feeble battle cry. Forth, men, to reasonable compromises!
He tried again. “I mean to say… I realise that I’m hesitant, occasionally oblivious, running to fat, certainly not the most inspiring king a subject could ask for but… I’m hardly despicable, am I? I’m no Glustrod. No Morlic the Mad.”
Grunts and grumbles of firm denial as he glanced around the roof. But what could a king expect from his courtiers except bland agreement on every point? Tunny, he noted, stayed silent.
“If I may, Your Majesty?” offered Lord Hoff, rubbing his hands like a horse-trader spying a simpleton upon whom to palm off his lamest nag. “The roots of this particular rebellion dig back into history. To your father’s time. To his father’s time.” Mutters of agreement. “You, I fear, have been unfortunate enough to reap the harvest. Discontent has been swelling for many years.” Heads bobbed as men nodded. “The seeds were sown in the war against Black Dow. The wars against the Snake of Talins. The war against Uthman-ul-Dosht, even.”
“Now that was a war,” came a voice.
“Master Sulfur.” Orso was less than entirely delighted to see the magus step out onto the roof of the clock tower. “You always seem to arrive at moments of high drama.”
“Never the slightest peace, Your Majesty. I have been in the North, doing my best to put an end to this rebellion before it began.”
Orso raised a brow at the thousands of armed men facing them. “With limited success, it would appear.”
“Alas, the younger generation refuses to honour the debts of the older. The debts that put them where they are. My master will ensure there is a reckoning, depend on that.”
“A huge comfort,” said Orso. By that point, there was every chance they would all be dead. “I don’t suppose you could do to Leo dan Brock’s army what you did to the Burners at the demonstration of Curnsbick’s engine, is there?”
Sulfur turned those strangely empty, different-coloured eyes upon him. “The magic leaks from the world, Your Majesty, and there are limits to what even I can achieve. An army is far beyond my powers.”
“Just the Young Lion himself, maybe?”
“A great risk with an uncertain outcome. My master prefers safe bets.”
Orso puffed out his cheeks. “Why he got into banking, no doubt.”
“That and so he could furnish you with the means to settle your problems by… more traditional methods.”
“For which I am immensely grateful, of course.” Orso had seen Sulfur rip a man apart with his teeth. He knew Bayaz had made a wreck of half the Agriont and killed thousands. He was sure Valint and Balk had done even more damage in the years since, with far less spectacle. Truly, he had made a pact with devils. But a man lost in the desert, as the Gurkish say, must take such water as he is offered.
Sulfur was surveying the battlefield. “We are expecting reinforcements, I take it?”
“Imminently,” said Orso, wondering whether Lord Marshal Rucksted would reach the field before they were utterly overwhelmed. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, he was spared from having to qualify the statement by a discordant mishmash of bugles, horns and shouted orders floating on the chill dawn.
“They’re advancing on the left,” said Tunny.
At this distance, the Open Council’s varied formations appeared to move with dreamlike slowness, inexorably southwards, through the patchwork of fields towards the tangled orchards around the river. It was hard to believe that all those tiny coloured dots were men. They seemed to flow like a fluid. Lurid shades of paint, perhaps, running together on the easel of a careless artist.
“They’re attacking,” said Hoff.
Orso gave him a withering sideways glance. “Oh, I don’t know, Lord Chamberlain. Perhaps they’re rushing forward to surrender.”
No one laughed, of course, not even Orso. It did not look as though it would be a day for laughs.
“Your Majesty?” A footman had appeared in purple finery, tray balanced on outstretched fingers, a selection of Visserine glassware gleaming with the morning sun. “A drink?”