The King's Blood

pikes seemed to waver in the air. The battering ram’s dull thud carried over everything, but the shouting changed. Dawson’s men shifted toward the new enemy.
    “The charge,” Dawson shouted, drawing his blade. “Sound the charge.”
    Dawson and the knights of Antea flew down toward the river and the waiting foe. There were more pikes than it had seemed, but not enough. A horse screamed and fell somewhere behind Dawson and to the left, but by the time he heard it he was already in the press, hewing at men’s heads and shoulders. To his right, Makarian Vey, Baron of Corren-hall, was swinging a battle hammer and shouting out an old taproom song. To his left, Jorey was chasing down an enemy soldier whose nerve had broken. Dawson’s fingers ached pleasantly and there was blood on his sword. The steady rhythm of the battering ram changed and a shout rose from the south. The white keep’s door, giving way.
    “The keep!” he shouted. “Finish them, and to the keep! Push these bastards back! Antea and Simeon!”
    A ragged shout answered him, and the knights of Antea turned with him, riding fast to the white keep.
    The bodies of Antean soldiers and farmers, men and boys, lay on the soft ground outside the keep, fallen from the ladders or arrow-pierced. Not all were dead. Within, the sounds of combat and murder rang. Dawson didn’t dismount, but rode through the keep’s yard, leaning hard toward the far gate. His knights rode behind him. The jade bridge reached across the river. Old rails had been built at its sides, worn planks bound to the jade top and bottom and nailed together. The wood was faded and splintering, a broken and decayed human work over the eternal and uncaring artifact of the dragons.
    Somewhere between thirty and forty men stood on the bridge. Behind them at the far side of the river the round keep stood. It looked taller from here, its wide wall leaning slightly out to make scaling it more difficult. Its gate was closed, shutting out both enemy and ally.
    But when they opened it to bring their men in, there would be a chance.
    “To me!” Dawson shouted. “All men to me!”
    His squire was long left behind, but the knights and the soldiers took up the call. To the Lord Marshal tolled through the keep like a bell. Six men took up the fallen battering ram, trotting up with it to just within the gate. One of them was a mess of blood, his right ear gone. On the bridge, the defeated men wailed and clamored to the round keep for shelter or steeled themselves for the charge.
    And then, above them, a new banner rose. And another. A third. A fourth.
    The reinforcements had come. Dawson looked over his shoulder at the assembled men. Of his knights, almost all remained with him. Of his foot, less. Much less. But there was a chance.
    “Archers fore!” he shouted.
    A dozen men, not more, ran to the gate, bows in their hands.
    “Don’t go all at once, boys,” Dawson said over the roar of the river and the laments of the bridge-trapped men. “We’re moving the bastards on the far side to pity. So take this slow.”
    One at a time, Dawson’s archers loosed arrows. The men on the bridge had nowhere to flee. They screamed and they wept and they shouted rage. Once, they charged Dawson’s line and were pushed back. The crowd of them grew smaller. Twenty men. Eighteen. Fourteen. Ten. The green of the jade and the red of the blood were like a thing from a painter’s brush, too beautiful to be wholly real. In despair, one man leaped into the churning water. Nine. Dawson kept his attention on the gate against which the doomed men were beating. It didn’t open.
    It wouldn’t.
    “End them all and close the gate,” Dawson said at last. “We’ll send word to the Lord Regent that the invasion is pushed back and the border secured.”
    And that we were too late , he didn’t say. He raised his sword and pulled it down, making his duelist’s salute to the opposing command as the white keep’s gate closed before him. The first battle of the war was a standoff, and if his experience told him anything, this was a sign of things to come.

Marcus
     
    I
    ’ll kill you,” the Kurtadam man shouted. His fists were balled at his sides. His furred cheeks and forehead softened the anguish in his face, leaving him looking less like a man whose hopes of a better life were being crushed and more like a disappointed puppy. “You can’t do this, I’ll kill you.”
    “You won’t,” Marcus said. “Really, just