“They’re coming,” the first soldier to reach them panted, eyes wide with fear. “We tried but we couldn’t hold them. Dark Lady take my soul! They’re coming.”
Jonmarc felt a hard knot form in the pit of his stomach. “Where’s the rest of your division?”
“Dead. Burned. Eaten. Gone, all of them—”
“Soldier, report!” Jonmarc snapped. “I need to know what happened.”
“It was bad, sir.” The voice came from another soldier, a man who looked to be about Jonmarc’s age and had the manner of a professional fighter. “They were waiting for us. Must have given the sentry ships the slip or blinded them with magic. Somehow, they got around us and landed up the coast in the inlets. There were thousands of them, and they’re headed this way.”
Jonmarc lifted his face to the wind, looking out over the slopes of tall, waving grass in the direction the soldiers had come from. “How long?”
“Maybe a candlemark. Not much more than that.”
“General Gregor?”
“Dead, sir. Fought like the Crone’s own, to the end. I saw him go down myself.”
Jonmarc swore. Much as he disliked Gregor, this was the wrong way to be rid of him. “All right,” Jonmarc said. “We’ll be ready when they get here. Valjan’s going to have to handle whatever happens in the bay.” With that, he rode down the line, shouting orders to his captains to get their men positioned to defend against an attack from the flank. Runners scrambled to take news of the new attack to Valjan and Exeter.
The sun slipped past its height before the distant sound of footsteps reached them.
“Here they come!” The cry started with a scout and echoed down the line as soldiers readied for the onslaught.
Animals, not men, led the advance. Wolves and bears covered ground with long, loping steps in a line of attack that Jonmarc guessed to be several hundred long. Row upon row followed them before the columns of regular soldiers appeared.
“Hold your positions!” Jonmarc shouted. Pikemen set their long, stout pikes into the ground at an angle readied for the attack. Behind them, archers lifted their bows. Neither the pikes nor the archers were likely to stop the attack, but they could make the enemy’s advance costly and decrease the numbers that made it through to battle the foot soldiers.
The cold fall air rang with the snarls of wolves and the roar of bears. Imri’s compelled shifters had a wild, mad look about them, not driven past the point of sanity like
ashtenerath
, but far beyond the point of caring for their own safety. The beasts launched themselves at the pikes, heedless of how many of their number fell to the ground impaled on the sharp tips. A hail of arrows rained down on the attackers, but the shifters never broke stride as their fellows dropped with arrows prickling from their bodies.
The line held for only moments before the shifters crashed through. Once the pikes were gone, the archers could not hold off the press themselves.
Foot soldiers waded to the fore, assisted by mounted men at arms, while the surviving archers fled to find new, more protected vantage points. In the fray, Jonmarc lost sight of Gethin, but the onslaught left no time to worry
about anything except holding off wave after wave of the desperate shifters.
It was obvious that the Temnottan soldiers were content to let the shifters bear the brunt of the battle. Jonmarc did not doubt that the soldiers would sweep in to take care of any Principality fighters left standing when the shifters were through. The shifters fought with an unnatural fury, and if the men inside the beasts’ forms knew that the Temnottans considered them expendable, it did not blunt the ferocity of their attack.
Packs of wolves in groups of threes and fours attacked soldiers, while the huge bears took on up to six men at a time. These shifters seemed driven to fight, no matter how uneven the odds against them. The unsettling rage in their eyes made Jonmarc wonder how much of the relentless attack was the effect of Imri’s curse, and how much was mass suicide by men pushed past reasoning.
Whether fear or anger drove the attack, the results were devastating. Jonmarc had personally killed a score of wolves, but he was tiring, and he knew his men could not hold out forever. The Temnottans held back, as if they were afraid of their own shifters, and perhaps, Jonmarc thought, they had reason. Whatever pain and compulsion drove the shifters to attack might wish to turn itself on their captors, though Jonmarc doubted Imri’s compulsion permitted it. The field was littered with more dead shifters than Principality soldiers, but exhausted by the fight, Jonmarc knew the numbers would change as soon as the Temnottans made their attack.
The sun was low in the sky, and the moon was large just above the horizon.
Ansu said that the curse could be lifted on Sohan night. He’d better mean early evening,
because there won’t be enough of us alive by midnight for it to matter by then
.
The light was fading as a fog rose from the ground. It was too sudden to be natural, and while the fog did not deter the shifters, Jonmarc saw consternation among the waiting Temnottans. Without warning, dozens of wolves appeared over the crest of the ridge behind Jonmarc’s troops, and Jonmarc fought a wave of despair at the thought of a renewed attack.
But these wolves did not head for Jonmarc’s weary soldiers. They ran at the Temnottans, teeth bared, snarling and snapping. Jonmarc saw the Temnottans scrambling to defend themselves, and the Volshe that controlled the shifters shouted spells in vain at the new wolves.
One of the Volshe collapsed under the weight of a huge, gray wolf, still shouting counter spells until the wolf snapped its powerful jaws on his neck, silencing him. The other Volshe screamed and ran, making it only a few steps until two more of the attacking wolves leaped together to bring him down.
When the Volshe fell, the Temnottan shifters seemed momentarily dazed, as if they had been driven on by a maddening drumbeat that suddenly stopped. Before the Temnottans could rally for an attack, Jonmarc’s soldiers seized the advantage, setting on the shifters before they could regain their wits.
The fog was swirling around the remaining shifters and the now-rattled Temnottan soldiers. The air had grown markedly colder, although the sun had not yet completely set. The fog took on the shape of wolves, and as the mist-wolves grew more solid, they joined the attack against Imri’s shifters and the Temnottan soldiers.
The Temnottans held their ground until the first of the attacking mist-wolves leaped at—and through—their line, emerging with a freshly torn heart in its massive jaws as the soldier fell dead behind it.
By now, the moon had risen, large and yellow. A sudden cold wind blew across a stand of trees, carrying a blizzard of golden leaves across the battlefield and stirring the tall grass. The wind’s intensity grew, and Jonmarc felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise, not from cold but from the insistent prickle he knew was magic.
A dull orange glow settled with the falling leaves, bathing the battlefield in an unnatural luminescence. The mist-wolves seemed unaffected, as did the wolves that had joined on the Principality side of the battle, wolves whose violet eyes marked them as
vyrkin
. The glow surrounded the Temnottan shifters like a nimbus, and the attacking bears and wolves stopped in their tracks. The wolves began to howl, and the bears roared, but as the nimbus grew brighter, their cries became high-pitched, and they fell to the ground writhing.
Jonmarc kept an eye on the Temnottan line of soldiers, but they held their ground, staring at the downed and glowing shifters. The shifters’ shapes began to blur, and a dull ripping sound echoed across the battlefield, as if someone tore a knife down through tanned hides. The shifters’ cries had become shrieks of pain and fear, as the wolf and bear bodies tore themselves apart in the orange glow, leaving in their place bloody, naked men.
Cries of fear rose from the Temnottans, who without their Volshe could not counter this sudden turnabout. As Jonmarc and his soldiers rounded up what remained of the compelled shifters with weary remorselessness, the
vyrkin
and mist-wolves ran the Temnottans to ground. No matter where the panicked Temnottans fled, the fog rose to meet them, until the twilight was filled with the howls of wolves and the snap of teeth. The
vyrkin
continued to harry the Temnottans, running them to ground or herding them back toward where the mist-wolves could finish them off.
Jonmarc chanced a look toward the ridge behind them. Vygulf stood in the moonlight, arms outstretched, face set with concentration. Farther down the ridge, Jonmarc could see Ansu, hands raised in a gesture of warding. Jonmarc turned back to the battlefield and was relieved to see Gethin making his way toward him. The Eastmark prince’s cuirass bore deep gouges, and his tunic and pants were spattered with blood. One arm bore a nasty gash. Only after he had noted Gethin’s injuries did Jonmarc stop to realize how many bruises and slashes of his own he had taken in the fight.
“What do you want us to do with the lot of them?” One of Jonmarc’s captains stood beside the shivering form of a Temnottan shifter. The man lay facedown, with his hands clasped behind his head.
Jonmarc looked up toward where Vygulf stood on the ridge. The
vyrkin
shaman slowly lowered his arms, lips still moving in a warding, and then walked down to where Jonmarc stood. Ansu joined them a moment later.
“Will they shift back if we leave them alive?” Jonmarc asked Vygulf with a jerk of his head toward the downed shifter. “The fight’s gone out of them.”
Vygulf looked across the field. Dozens of the shifters lay unmoving, distinguished from the corpses by the Principality soldiers standing over them, swords ready. “The
Sohan night magic has stripped the compulsion from them. So long as they don’t rejoin the mage who cast the curse, they should remain human.” He shrugged. “Cage them if you like. If they shift, your archers can take care of them, but I don’t think you’ll have a problem.”
Jonmarc let out a silent sigh of relief. Killing in battle was something he had learned to live with long ago, but he had no desire to skewer surrendering troops. He turned back toward the soldiers who were awaiting orders. “Tie them up, cover them up, and march them back to the holding area,” he shouted.
He met Vygulf’s gaze. “Thank you. Between your magic and whatever the mages did for Sohan, it saved our hides.” He glanced to Ansu. “I really don’t want to think about how this would have gone without you.”
Ansu nodded. “I’m pleased to have arrived in time.”
Vygulf looked out over the fields in the direction the Temnottans had retreated. “My wolves will harry them back to their camp and report their location and numbers. Come morning, you can do as you please with the survivors.”
“Pleased to see you and your men on your feet.” The newcomer’s voice startled Jonmarc, who turned to see Laisren striding out of the shadows.
“How did Valjan fare?”
Laisren shrugged. “The Temnottans landed a force of men and shifters, but the mages worked their Sohan magic on them.” He gave a grim smile. “Fortunately, such magic does not affect those of us for whom change is voluntary. We were able to help with the attack, much as the
vyrkin
aided you.” He licked his lips. “It was an expensive evening for Temnotta.”
Behind Jonmarc, captains called their troops to order and men gathered the wounded and the prisoners. In daylight, they would return to make a pyre of the dead. Jonmarc looked out over the fields toward where the Temnottans had fled.
Jonmarc looked from Laisren to Ansu. “If Valjan can spare the
vayash moru
, I want you to go looking for General Gregor’s division. We received warning from men who said they were the only survivors, that Gregor and the rest had been killed.” He met Laisren’s gaze. “We need to know if that’s the truth, and if there are survivors, we’ll need them back at camp. It’s too dark for me to set out now with a search party, but I don’t like the idea of wounded men lying untended all night.”
Laisren nodded. “Let me rally the other
vayash moru
, and we’ll report what we find.” He looked out over the darkened battlefield. “As expensive as we made it for the Temnottans, I dare say we’ve paid a high price ourselves.”
“The question is—how many more do they have to send against us?” Jonmarc paused as a thought struck him, and he turned to Ansu and Vygulf. “If this Imri and his Volshe could compel their own soldiers into wolves and bears, can he turn something like that against our men?”
Vygulf thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “Doubtful. That kind of magic takes a great deal of energy. I don’t think their mages created such a large number of shifters quickly. They’ve been preparing for this invasion for quite some time, I’d say. Our mages have placed wardings around the camps; I dare say after this, they’ll do some more powerful workings. I think you’re safe from seeing your men turned into wolves.”
“As Laisren said, the nature—and magic—of
vayash
moru
are different. We are immune to this type of magic,” Ansu replied. He met Jonmarc’s gaze. “I have some thoughts about how to assure that our prisoners will not fall victim to the same magic again. I’ll test my theory, and let the other mages know what I find.” With that, he strode off in the direction the captives had been taken.
Jonmarc’s attention returned to Gethin. The Eastmark prince had stood silently throughout the whole exchange. “Had enough excitement for one day?” Jonmarc asked, taking in Gethin’s appearance.