Battles are fought in muddy fields, in burning towns, in treacherous forests, in unforgiving mountains, and on the blood-spattered stones of contested bridges, Tavi realized. But battles are won within the minds and hearts of the soldiers fighting them. No force was defeated in battle until it believed that it was defeated. No force could be victorious unless it believed it could be victorious.
The First Aleran believed.
The Canim raiders weren’t sure.
At that time, on that bridge, before the terrible swords of the sons of Antil-lus, before the crushing power of the Knights Terra, before the blackened banner of the First Aleran and the reckless, frenzied charge of the Battlecrows, those two facts were what mattered.
It was as simple as that.
The resistance of the Canim forces on the bridge did not simply waver-it abruptly vanished, as panic descended on them. Max and Crassus pressed the assault, and Tavi led the Battlecrows after them. On the walls behind them, trumpets rang. Valiar Marcus had seen the Canim break, and the rest of the weary Legion began rushing forward to lend their strength and momentum to the advance.
The advance had to cover most of five hundred yards, all uphill to the defenses at the bridge’s apex-which had not, after all, been designed to defend against an assault from the Aleran side of the bridge. Without battlements, the only real protection they offered the Canim was the simple impediment of movement caused by the walls themselves and the relatively small opening in them.
That opening, however, also slowed the Canim now attempting to flee. The legionares were slower on foot than their opponents, but caught up to them as the choke point in the wall stranded them on the northern side.
Tavi was barely able to get his cohort into a more conventional fighting front, incorporating the Knights in its center, before the vengeful Alerans fell on the Canim. Canim screamed. Legionares went down. Tavi fought to keep the lines stable, to get the wounded clear of the fighting before they were trampled. The desperate Canim rushed up onto the improvised battlements and threw themselves over, perfectly willing to fall rather than face the juggernaut of the First Aleran’s advance. A few even cast themselves off the bridge. It was a long, dangerous fall to the water from there, the maximum height of the bridge from its surface.
Dangerous as it might have been, the waiting sharks were a far more serious threat-and after two days of constant blood-taint in the water and relatively little food, they were hungry. Nothing that fell into the river came out alive again.
Tavi was the first legionare to mount up onto the battlements at the bridge’s center. Ehren was close behind him, and a roar went up from the Alerans as the black eagle/crow banner gained the wall.
Tavi watched as Max and his Knights plunged through the opening in the wall to make sure the Canim had a reason to continue their retreat. They were followed by a number of excited Battlecrows who should have been taking defensive positions, but who had allowed the heat of battle to control their movements. Max, Crassus, and the Knights Terra settled for crippling blows upon the fleeing Canim where they had to, and the following legionares finished up the gruesome work the Knights had begun.
Tavi had no idea whether Max realized how far past the wall the assault had actually rolled, and he signaled the Battlecrows’ trumpeter to sound the halt. The clarion call rolled out over the downhill slope of the far side of the bridge, and at its signal Max looked around him, and even a hundred yards away, Tavi could see the expression of dismay on Max’s face as he saw how far forward he’d come.
Beside Tavi, Kitai sighed and rolled her eyes. “Alerans.”
Max got the Knights and legionares stopped and began an orderly withdrawal back to the wall at the bridge’s center.
Tavi glanced over his shoulder, then turned and started back down to the surface of the bridge, barking out orders. “Bring up the engineers! Knights Aeris to the wall! Battlecrows, with me!”
Ehren followed hard on his heels. “Uh, sir? Shouldn’t we be preparing to, uh, you know. Defend against a counterattack?”
“That’s what we’re doing,” Tavi said. He stalked through the opening in the wall and out onto the surface of the bridge. Tavi stared down the Elinarch’s slope, to where the Canim were already rallying, down at the next defensive wall. “Schultz! Bring them up!”
“Right,” Ehren said. His voice sounded distinctly nervous. “It’s just that it seems a shame that the engineers went to all this trouble to build us a real nice wall, and here we are out in front of it. Not using it. I’m just worried that it might hurt their feelings.”
“The Knights need the space on the walls and the engineers can’t afford to be interrupted by a breakthrough. We have to buy them all room to work in,” Tavi said.
“Us,” Ehren said. “And one cohort.” He stared down the bridge. “Against the next best thing to sixty thousand Canim.”
“No,” Kitai put in quietly. “Us against one.”
Tavi nodded. “Sari.”
Ehren said, “Ah.” He glanced back as the Battlecrows filed into place around them. “You don’t think there’s a chance he might bring a friend or two?”
“That’s the idea,” Tavi said. “Make sure they can see the standard.”
Ehren swallowed and adjusted the standard against the wind. “So they know exactly where you are.”
“Right,” Tavi said.
Down the slope of the bridge, brassy horns began to blare once more-this time in a different sequence than used before. Tavi watched as Canim began to emerge from the opening in the next wall, and his heart sped up as he did.
Every single one of them wore the mantles and hoods of the ritualists. They fell into rows, clouds of greenish smoke dribbling from censers, many of them clutching long bars of iron, each end ribbed with dozens of fang-shaped steel blades. They formed the spearhead of a column of raiders, pouring out onto the bridge by the dozens. The hundreds. The thousands.
“Oh, my,” Ehren said quietly.
“There,” Tavi said to Kitai, barely suppressing a surge of excitement. “Coming up from the back. See the bright red armor?”
“That is he?” she asked. “Sari?”
“That’s him.”
Ehren said, “Signal your Knights Flora. Have them kill him when he advances. They could almost do it from here.”
“Not good enough,” Tavi said. “We can’t simply kill him. The next ritualist down the ladder will just step into his place. We’ve got to discredit him, break his power, prove that whatever he promised the rest of his people, he isn’t able to deliver.”
“He can’t deliver if there’s an arrow stuck through his gizzard,” Ehren pointed out. But he sighed. “You always seem to do things the hard way.”
“Habit,” Tavi said.
“How are you going to discredit him?”
Tavi turned and beckoned. Crassus leapt lightly down from the wall, as if the ten-foot drop did not exist. He made his way to Tavi’s side through the troops and saluted him. “Captain.”
Tavi walked a bit ahead of the troops, out of easy earshot. “Ready?”
“Yes, sir,” Crassus said.
Tavi drew a small cloth bag from his pocket and passed it over to Crassus. The Knight Tribune opened the pouch and dumped the little red bloodstone into his hand. He stared at it for a moment, then put the gem back and pocketed it. “Sir,” he said quietly. “You’re sure this was in my mother’s pouch.”
Tavi knew he wouldn’t accomplish anything by repeating himself. “I’m sorry,” he told Crassus.
“It was the only such gem she had?”
“As far as I know,” Tavi said.
“She’s… she’s ambitious,” Crassus said quietly. “I know that. But I just can’t believe she’d…”
Tavi grimaced. “It’s possible we don’t know the whole story. Maybe we’re misinterpreting her actions.” Tavi did not believe it for a second. But he needed Crassus to be confident, not gnawed by guilt and self-doubt.
“I just can’t believe it,” Crassus repeated. “Do you think she’s all right?”
Tavi put a hand on Crassus’ shoulder. “Tribune,” he said quietly, “we can’t afford to divide our focus right now. There will be plenty of time for questions after, and I swear to you that if I’m alive, we’ll find her and answer them. But for now, I need you to set this aside.”