The King's Blood

“And then in victory.”
    T
    hey armed.
    The priests had wanted to talk to all the men, to assure them all that what was about to happen wouldn’t be Lord Marshal Kalliam marching three hundred men into a slaughter chute. Dawson didn’t allow it. Bad enough that Palliako was taking orders from foreigners and priests. That he was taking them from Palliako.
    As soon as he’d left the close little room, the regrets and misgivings had begun to crawl back. But by then the order was given, and there was still that small, almost-silent voice in his mind that said maybe it could all end well.
    All night, the priests had stood on the bridge, shouting themselves hoarse in the darkness. The river seemed to shout with them. The rhetoric was much as Dawson had heard before, but there were occasional flourishes. The spirits of the dead marched beside the soldiers of Antea and protected them from harm. The arrow shot at Antean soldiers would turn aside. The river itself was allied with the Severed Throne. It was all about as subtle as schoolyard taunts, but taken over the long, black hours, it built a story in which being loyal to Asterilhold was an unfortunate thing.
    Dawson tried to sleep, but only managed a few hours. And then his squire came and told him it was time.
    The charge would come at dawn when the sun would be in the enemy’s eyes. They had a better battering ram now— a wider log, and a bronze wedge fixed on the end. A thin roof of slats and thatching would slow the arrows down. Any number of other things could be rained down on it. Hot oil or boiling water. Open flame. It might take half an hour to shatter the opposing gates. How many men could he lose in half an hour? All of them, near enough.
    Mist rose from the ground as the first pale light of dawn appeared, blue and rose stretching fingers across the sky. The shouting priests were harsh as crows.
    “Men,” Dawson said, addressing his knights. “We are the lords of Antea and the Severed Throne. Nothing more need be said.”
    Their swords rang as they cleared their scabbards, his knights making their salute. Dawson turned his mount, and they took their places.
    As the first sunlight struck the round keep, Dawson sounded the charge. His farmers and peasants and landless soldiery surged forward across the bridge, their voices blending into a single roar that shouted down the water. For a moment, Dawson let himself believe that the enemy had been stunned into inactivity, paralyzed by the sight of them. Then arrows began to rain down. He watched a man struck in the shoulder stumble and fall into the river and be swept away. More arrows. More screams.
    And then the thud of the battering ram began. His mount danced beneath him, frightened by the chaos or feeling his own anxiety or both. The three priests stood by the open mouth of the white keep, huddled in their brown robes looking sleepy and worn.
    If we fail, I will send Palliako their heads , he thought.
    The press of bodies on the far side of the bridge seemed to breathe, a great, half-formed giant. The ram was its elephantine heart. They weren’t scattered. The arrows weren’t breaking the formation, and while there had been a few torches dropped from the merlons above, the ram hadn’t taken fire. They were doing well. Even if they died, they died bravely.
    Something changed. The thud and thud and thud became a crack. And then a splintering. And then a shout went up and the men before him were pushing into the round keep through broken doors.
    “Take them!” Dawson shouted. “Knights of Antea, to me! To me !”
    Leaning close to his horse’s back, he flew across the bridge, his lips pulled back in a grimace of rage and joy and the lust of battle. The clot of bodies he struck on the other side was as much his own side as the others, but they scattered all the same. And then all of them were there, inside the keep’s round courtyard, breaking over the enemy like a wave and washing them away. Something was burning, the smoke acrid and dense and invigorating. The screams of the soldiers was music.
    By midday, even the last of it was over. Sixty soldiers of Asterilhold dead. Twice that captured. He could only guess the number scattered to the winds and the waters. Most of all, the dragon’s jade road was his, cleared and opened into the heart of the enemy’s kingdom.
    He stood on the ramparts of this, his new keep, the first soil west of the Siyat that an Antean had unquestionably held for a