I step to my right, second guess, then step to my left as a line of infantrymen heaves backward, slamming into me and throwing me to the ground. I roll to the side, flip around, narrowly avoiding stomping boots and clomping horse hooves as Dominick’s men move in one giant mass to the back left. Noam’s pulling them around—why?
A hand grabs my arm and before I can process who it is, I’m clinging to a saddle and hefting my leg up to straddle the rider.
“I trained you to blend in better than that,” the rider throws back at me.
I freeze, arms around Sir’s waist, cheeks warm in shame and frustration at being caught. On the bright side, I can take off the helmet now.
As I yank the metal oven off my head and toss it to the ground, Sir urges his horse to a trot behind Dominick’s regiment. They continue to pull behind the rest of the infantry, moving to the left and back. The rest of the infantry closes in to fill their gap.
“Are you going to take me back to the palace?”
Dominick’s men swing to the right, aligning themselves behind the leftmost cavalry.
“You’re going to stay with me,” Sir hisses. He motions to my crossbow. “Cut down the closest ones first. Whatever you do, whatever happens, do not stop firing.”
I yank an arrow into my crossbow as Sir kicks his horse into a gallop. We shoot past Dominick’s soldiers, bearing wide around the cavalrymen until we line up with the first row of riders.
“Three counts,” the cavalry captain tells Sir.
“Your mark.”
The captain raises his sword into the air. I lean around Sir, scanning the horizon for what we’re going to be fighting. And there, from Bithai’s lush green hills, a wave of nightmares rises.
Angra’s cavalry crests a hill in front of us, horses coated in armor, soldiers raising crossbows or swords or axes. More infantrymen in black sun armor run between the pounding hooves.
That’s why Noam pulled Dominick’s regiment here. On the far left, if that cavalry breaks through, they’ll be able to work their way between the rest of Noam’s army and Bithai’s gate.
Another rider gallops up beside us. Mather. He meets my eyes, steady and sure, as Spring’s riders draw nearer. Just one more hill, and they’ll be within arrow range.
“One,” the captain shouts, breaking me away from Mather’s eyes. “Two.”
I lift my crossbow into the air. This is it. I’ve been in hand-to-hand combat with small groups of Spring soldiers, but never a war. A strange calm settles over everyone, something not urged from Noam’s conduit. A deeper instinct that blocks everything else.
“Three!”
Sir and I heave forward with Noam’s cavalry. The world slows until there’s nothing more than the pounding of our horses’ hooves, the screaming of the soldiers, the wave of arrows that rises up from Spring’s archers and paints the sky with violent streaks of black.
I fire my crossbow, fire again, slowly lowering my arch as we draw closer and closer to Spring’s riders. In those final seconds before we collide, Sir reaches down and touches my leg. Mather turns to look at me, his eyes wide in the calm before the storm. I feel everything happening around me as if watching from a dream.
Years of training take over. Our horses merge seamlessly into Spring’s cavalry and arrows fly, swords slice through the air and into throats, knives lodge in chests. My crossbow sings out the hum of arrows flying, a symphony that ends in satisfying thwacks into shoulders and knees and other weak points in Spring’s armor. My crossbow isn’t a weapon I’m holding—it is me, and I am it, and the two of us bring down soldier after soldier like we were made to do nothing else.
Sir rears his horse around and I break out of my stupor long enough to note that we’ve crossed through all of Angra’s cavalry. At first I’m flooded with the sweet, pure burst of relief—there are so few of them! But then I see what waits for us behind the cavalry.
“MATHER!”
Sir’s scream rips holes in my body, breaking me out of my stupor. I whirl around to see Mather nearing us. He’s almost here too. He’s almost—
I don’t have time to finish the thought.
Cannons waited for us. Dozens of them, pulled by oxen over the hills. Soldiers stand next to the iron monstrosities, and even from so far away, I can see, feel, taste their glee as they light the explosives that will send death barreling toward us. That’s all I have time to absorb, the horrific weight of the soldiers’ impending joy at our demise, and just as my eyes register that the black balls slamming into the earth around us are cannonballs, an invisible force shocks me off the horse and cracks me like a rag doll against the ground.