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If I had hoped for more order and less panic on the other side of the wall, then I’d been a fool. People ran through the street with stretchers, water, oil for the fires, and mismatched weapons. Some of the younger boys – thirteen or fourteen – were stripped down to their shirts and breeches, running messages. Which was all well and good, but just as many men ran from the frontlines of battle, their faces etched with terror.
I grabbed the first one to cross my path, throwing him against the wall of a house.
“Pull yourself together, man!” I shouted.
His eyes were wild, mouth working soundlessly. I clucked my tongue. What to do about them? There were dozens running toward me on this street alone. Every man lost to fear was one less to help his brothers on the front line. And Lee Estabis and his officers were too busy fighting to be rounding up fleeing men like a children’s nurse.
“I’ve got him, Dragon Rider,” a voice said from behind me.
My eyebrows rose. It was the man from the Castel. He didn’t have his master’s goods weighing him down anymore.
I nodded briskly letting the man take hold of the deserter. His scolding words sounded an awful lot like my own from moments before.
I strode to the middle of the street, raised my spear with the red flag still attached and waved it in the wind, shouting from deep in my diaphragm. My throat was still raw, but what did that matter? By tomorrow, I might not have a throat to worry about.
“All men fleeing the golems, rally here. All men! Rally! Rally, flame you!”
They weren’t paying attention. Fear ruled them.
I pointed my spear at the closest one. “You, sir, rally or I will spear you myself!”
“Really? You’ll spear him?” my mimic laughed. “The man who couldn’t even kill Katlana and prevent this?”
That stung.
But the man I’d pointed to stopped in his tracks, his eyes on me instead of skittering off everything in sight.
“Rally here,” I barked, and he moved like I was an officer.
I pointed at the next man. “Rally, sir, or so help you I will make you rally!”
He swerved toward us, nearly tumbling into us in his haste to obey. The man from the Castel was hustling the deserter into line with us. I stepped up on top of an overturned crate nearby.
“All men fleeing, rally here!”
Below me, I heard the men talking.
“That’s what he said in the Castel. I heard it myself. This Dragon Rider has a plan.”
“No one has a plan! I saw Jand from the butcher’s shop torn to pieces right in front of my eyes! And our officer was next.”
“My brother fell from the wall. He was right beside me. One of those things knocked him right off. That’s no way to die!”
I looked down at them, setting my jaw.
“Enough.”
“You don’t know what it’s like out there!” someone called.
“You need to rule your fear instead of letting it rule you,” I said. Did they think I wasn’t afraid? Did they think Lee Estabis wasn’t? We were all afraid or we wouldn’t be alive.
“That’s easy to say from the back of a dragon,” one of the men said.
More were rallying to us as I waved the spear. There were thirty now, there’d be fifty in a moment. Now was the time to grab them and turn them around.
“Life isn’t easy. None of it is. It might feel like it’s impossible right now. Like it would be impossible to get back out there and fight, but that fight is coming for you. Whether you face it with a weapon in your hand and courage in your heart, or whether it comes for you, leaping out of the shadows to plunge its jaws into your defenseless back – well, that’s up to you. You don’t get to walk away from this fight. None of us do. We only get to choose how to fight it. Who you are – what you’re made of – we’re going to see that today. Don’t let your families down. Don’t let yourselves down. And don’t flaming let me down or you’ll wish a golem had you in his grip. This is the Dominion. We fought the Truth War for our freedom. We fought and we won. We can win again. But only if every one of us stands and fights. Only if every one of us does what we need to do today and does it with courage.”
Speeches like that shouldn’t work. They were just words. Useless, flimsy words in a world where only steel and muscle made a real difference.
I rubbed at the tiger’s eye pendant on my chest. Sometimes I wondered if it were lucky. If it was, I could use that luck right now.
As if in response to my hope, I heard murmurs of agreement below me, and whispers at the edges where men who had heard my speech passed it on to new arrivals.
“Now lay hold of your arms, or if you’ve lost them, lay hold of what you can find. And follow me.”
I leapt from the crate, landing between two owl-eyed men and marched forward, flag swirling in the wind above my head. I was no leader of men, but I’d seen leaders and I knew how to copy them. Hopefully, this would work. I was no Lee Estabis with broad shoulders straining in the confines of my metal armor and a brave, firm jaw. I was just Tor Winespring, troublemaker.
And I was about to make trouble for the golems.
The man from the Castel caught up to me, falling in step beside me with a barrel stave clutched in one hand.
“What are we going to do when we get there, Dragon Rider?” he asked.
“We’re going to show them how easily metal crumples.”
He laughed nervously.
“You can call me, Tor,” I said. “Not Dragon Rider. Just Tor.”
“I’m Honam. I worked as a clothier’s apprentice.”
“Cut a lot of cloth?”
“Sure.”
“Good. It’s time for you to cut some golems down to size.”
It was a weak joke, but at moments like this people would laugh at just about anything. They just wanted to think that something out there could still be funny. There was laughter behind me and I was relieved to hear it was more than I expected.
I didn’t turn to look. I didn’t want to seem uncertain. Leaders never looked uncertain. They always looked like they could do anything. Like nothing surprised them. These men needed that right now.
I could see others joining us from my periphery. Stragglers from side streets or fleeing right into our ranks were somehow absorbed by their fellows, turned around by whispered conversation and looks of awe. They could be in as awe of me as they needed if it got them back to the battle. It was only an illusion. No more real than my mimic. But for now, it was all I had to offer them.
We were more than a hundred strong by the time we reached the battlefront. And it wasn’t nearly enough.