15

 

The Sienese lifted their portcullis only when the Company of the Star had backed a quarter-mile away. The iron screeched and ground from weeks of disuse and settling. It halted halfway, jammed.

It made Fia smile to think that the company might have warped the gates, though they had never attacked the gate directly.

The Sienese delegation could have fit underneath, but that would have been insufferable to their dignity. And none of them were likely to risk the spiked bars crashing back down upon them. After half a minute of unstifled laughter from the company, the gate resumed rising, and the moment of levity vanished.

Crossbowmen lined the city’s walls. Fia’s stood behind her, with more horsemen waiting. For the first time in the weeks of the siege, she got a glimpse of the city through the gates: an open square bracketed by the city barracks. The one street she saw was empty but for soldiers and filth. There were no carts or stalls or men or women or children out at all.

The dawn had just broken, but already her bare wrists and ankles were sheened with sweat. Her riding skirt hung still in the stagnant air. In spite of the heat, she regretted not wearing her armor. This close to the city, she felt naked, unguarded. This day would be humiliating enough.

It was the commune that was surrendering, not her, and yet she had lost. She had not gotten inside the city’s walls. She had not claimed Siena for her own.

She had failed to rewrite the terms of her war. She was still as she had started.

Her courser fought with his reins, tucking his head back and forth. He had stood at bay in lines like this before, always before a battle. He expected a fight at any moment. His agitation only increased as the Sienese approached. Fia could not even cuff him for fear that he would take that as a signal to charge.

She knew how he felt.

The delegation was not the most impressive she’d seen. Some of the Sienese wore armor, but no one at the front. The lead man was dressed as unwarlike a nobleman as she had ever seen. His hood and draped mantle matched his red beard, but his tunic was striped gold and orange. His pointed violet shoes must have taken special assistance to mount.

She nudged her mount forward. One hand was on her commander’s baton, and the other on her sword. The delegation’s leader met her gaze, but then looked among the rest of the assembled officers. “Which of you is Temur Antonov?”

Fia just resisted the impulse to snarl. “Captain Antonov declined to join you today.” Antonov had surprised Fia by for once taking the initiative. He had offered to lead the army now pivoting against John Hawkwood and his Company of Saint George.

Hawkwood was finally coming. A day ago, her pioneers had clashed with his. He was moving on the Sienese countryside, burning and pillaging just like her. He was moving steadily now, and toward her.

The Sienese man’s nose curled. He looked her up and down, and she could not tell whether his disgust stemmed from the fact that she led the Cult of Saint Renatus or that she was a woman. This time, she let the snarl through. She had spent her whole life surmounting naked slights like these.

The company’s terms had been agreed on days ago and signed the night before. This was only to be a final signing, a ritual wax seal on her and the Sienese’s mutual humiliation. Those of the company who remained here were a facade, a show of strength to discourage last minute betrayal. The bulk of her company, and all those companies who remained with her, had turned about and gone to meet Hawkwood.

The Sienese were to deliver hundreds of horses, all that remained within the city, as well as wine, dried fruit, mules, bolts of canvas, timber, salt, over a hundred moggias of grain, crossbow bolts and arrows, and box upon box of gold florins. All supplies and booty that, under any other circumstances, Fia would have been thrilled to have. The Sienese were now paying them too, to hold off the Company of Saint George. The Sienese were terrified of John Hawkwood and his grudge against their commune. They had nothing left to pay Hawkwood when he too came for them.

It was midday by the time the treasure trains departed Siena’s gates. Fia stayed long enough to see the first few carts unloaded, and then left Szarvasi Janos in charge of delivering the loot to her company’s treasure train. No doubt Janos would contrive to slip some of the most valuable loot to himself. On another day, she might have cared.

She had miles yet to go. She should have traveled with escorts, but she did not announce her departure, and no one immediately ventured to follow. All of them but her had choreographed roles. The company had hacked their way through the surrounding forests, left trails for carts, but such hasty work couldn’t make clean footing. Her horse picked its way around ruts and dips.

Her inner voice had not spoken since it confessed to trying to make her a martyr. Now that she was alone, her inner voice decided it had a lot to say.

What did you imagine you wanted?

The question nearly stopped her. “Aren’t you within me? Don’t you know?”

I ask because I wonder if you know.

Fia did not care how she looked to anyone who might see her talking to herself. “I want the march to end,” she said. “I’m tired of it.” By seizing Siena, she might have changed who she was – changed what the company was. “I don’t want any soldier to have to be the tools of foreign powers. All of us have deserve better than the lot we received.”

You want respect, it said. You want to be greater. You’re ashamed of who you were. What is it you think you could have built in Siena? Can you build anything?

“I built an army.”

In the same sense that an arsonist “builds” a fire.

It was mocking her. She ought not answer. She felt blackness crawling around the edge of her mind. Earlier in her career, that was how she’d fallen so far she had almost not come back. It was trying to undermine her.

She tightened her hand around the hilt of her sword, though she did not know what she would do with it. “You know just enough to make a fool of me.”

The march will end soon, it said.

It was not the friend it had pretended to be, and it no longer cared that she knew. Dread swelled in her stomach. She did not know what she was going to do now. All of her plans had hinged upon Siena. It was hard to imagine her future now.

She smelled her camp’s smoke before she saw the first of her men. Wherever her company went, smoke followed. Fortune did not often give her a chance to see her army at the ready. Even at reduced strength, it was impressive. Clumps of men clung to the horizon like moss to a trunk. The bright colors of her pavilion stood out easily enough. It was the only tent up now. It was a symbol of the company.

The men had arrayed ahead a line of carts: the carroccios. They were more important than the banners. They carried barrels of water, and served as rallying points. For men exhausted by heat, by exertion, they were infusions of life. The company’s comet-and-spear banners flew far above each cart. A company that lost its carroccios was as good as lost.

But Fia wagered she knew something more important to Hawkwood.

As impressive as her army looked, it could have been better. Since Blazovic, two more captains had deserted Fia’s service. They had taken with them a total of eight hundred men. At the outset of the siege of Siena, her scouts and spies had finally gotten through to report on Hawkwood’s strength. They said she and Hawkwood had approximately equal numbers. Now she estimated that she had about two-thirds his numbers, and that was discounting any recruiting he’d done along his travels.

Listen to me, her inner voice said. This will not end the way you want it to.

Six men in armor stood outside her pavilion. This near to battle, the company could not take the chance that one of Hawkwood’s spies would also take the opportunity to be an assassin. She shouldn’t have traveled alone. She could not muster the energy to care.

She was sure Hawkwood had riddled her camp with spies. She had been unable to accomplish the same. The papal forces were hostile to the cult of Saint Renatus. His inner circle were all foreigners, loyal Englishmen.

Antonov was in conference with their remaining captains. They stopped speaking when Fia entered the pavilion, but only briefly. Antonov wore his pendant of Saint Renatus, the silver sword etched over the comet. She’d had it fashioned for him when she’d had the money to do so. It had been some time since she’d seen it on him.

Fia had ordered Caterina to the pavilion to ready her war horses. The horses stood ready, but there was no sign of Caterina. No doubt one of the new guards had chased her off. Not all of the other companies’ men knew Fia had a girl as a page.

Fia entered the deliberations as though she’d always been there. In spirit, she had. She’d set the broad course of the battle the day before. There were always new reports, new complications. Antonov had managed well enough in her absence.

She had expected Hawkwood to come down the Via Francigena. He had – to begin with. But he had been up and down it many times before, and remembered the landscape well. Two days ago, he had diverted into the pastures and scattered forests northwest of Siena. Much farther in that direction and he would have run into the Apennines, but he’d left himself plenty of ground between road and mountain. He had chosen the route that would give him the maximum amount of wide open space. He was relying on the brute strength of his forces rather than any clever trick of geography.

No surprise there. Arrogant Englishmen always held themselves to be better riders than their Italian counterparts. No land was completely neutral, though. Antonov had scouted in person. He outlined the copses of trees that could hide men, and steep-banked creeks he expected would become killing funnels. He’d already placed crossbowmen, archers, and pikemen to protect them. Fia’s input amounted to little more than tinkering. His plans seemed deceptively effortless, as all elegance did.

After the others had departed, Fia said, “I thought you were finished with war.”

“This doesn’t mean I’m not,” he said.

She held his gaze. There had to be more to him than that. There was always more to it.

He said, “The company is in the balance. It’s the only thing I have.”

She said, “And we have enemies in the unusual position of being able to destroy it.” To spare him from leaving the accusation unspoken, she added, “Because of me.”

“Yes,” he said, and sounded almost relieved that he could. Like he’d held the words pent in his throat all this time.

She had asked him this before, but now was a far better time: “Do you believe what I told you? About Saint Renatus?”

“If not the man’s life, then in the lessons. Inferior men manage the world, own its properties. We deserve better than the degradation of working for them.” He could not have tolerated doing as Hawkwood had, aligning himself so closely with the papacy or a commune or kingdom. “If you are asking if I would take back the support I gave you, that answer is no. But there is a limit to the number of times I can suffer being reborn. Every battle I’ve fought changed me. A man can only bear being holy for so long. I want to rest, and not pick up my sword again.”

“For a man like you, that might as well mean lie down and die.”

“Even that would be better at some point.”

“I’ll do you the favor of pretending I didn’t hear that.”

“I was not always a soldier. I had a family and prospects.”

“Those are just memories. They’re not your life. You’ve been remade dozens of times since them. You can’t go back home even if you travel there.”

“I did what I wanted. What about you, Fia? Word of Saint Renatus has swept Italy. It’s traveled farther and faster than I would have dreamed. Every week, we hear about converts in Hungary, in Greece, in Croatia, in Syria and the Holy Land.”

“If only they were here now.”

“Just because they haven’t flocked to the company, that doesn’t mean you haven’t accomplished what you wanted.” He waited for her to speak, and, when she didn’t, said the obvious: “But that hasn’t been enough for you, either.”

“No.” Just as terse as he’d been.

“Why not?”

“If we had taken Siena, we would be fighting a different kind of battle. We would have an advantage over Hawkwood and anyone else the papacy sent to scatter us.” Then she and the company could rule rather than rob, and spread the veneration of Saint Renatus through a thousand new means. Siena would have just been the start.

“Was that what you would have said fifteen years ago?”

It wasn’t. Only there was a hollowness now that she’d done what she’d set out to do. That’s where this drive to take Siena, to go east, to change the world, had come from. That was why her inner voice was leading her elsewhere, she realized. It had seen all that she had done, and was ready for her to consummate her work with martyrdom.

She was not yet ready to be reborn in that way.

He told her, “We might be alive tomorrow, and we might even have the company left to us. Consider what you would like to do with the both of them. And if wouldn’t be better to leave – like I am.”

She did not have the time to think. As Antonov spoke, more of their men pushed past the entrance flaps, breathless with reports of the enemy’s advance.

 

The best view of the battlefield was offset to the east, atop the rising slopes that bound the course of the Via Francigena. Fia, Antonov, and a handful of her corporals rode up in the morning’s blazing heat. Her palfrey struggled under the unaccustomed weight of her armor. It was a riding horse, not a war horse, but she wanted her coursers fresh for later. She had neglected only her helmet, her gauntlets, and her iron boots. Sweat soaked into her armor’s padding, slicked the scars on her bare hands.

Caterina rode her pony beside them. Fia hadn’t seen when she’d caught up. She bore a small but livid bruise on her right cheekbone. She looked away when Fia glanced at her. Fia could not watch Caterina every moment of her life. But Caterina wore her foot-and-a-half sword prominently angled at her hip.

Gray-bearded clouds shadowed the eastern sky. Fia tasted rain on the wind, but that wind did not blow very hard. The rain would not arrive in time to spoil the initial clash of arms.

The valley twisted into the haze of the horizon. From this height, the Via Francigena was just a white streak. When the pope had lived in Rome, pilgrims and all their attendant trade traveled the Via Francigena. Now that the papacy had relocated to Avignon, the pope sent only soldiers, arsonists, ravagers. Men like her. It was easy to conceptualize the valley as a churning intestine, and the road as a worm within. This near to battle, Fia could not escape thinking in terms of blood and bowels.

Fia’s eyesight was not good enough to find individual banners. Antonov pointed out each opposing commander’s regiment. All of the enemy’s bannermen and carroccios flew the crimson and gold stars of the papacy, with their commanders’ colors beneath. Hawkwood’s company was difficult to find. His subordinates flew their own colors, as if in self-parody of Englishmen’s pride and preening.

Antonov pointed to a line of infantry behind a rapidly-forming cavalry screen. “Cocco seems to have the largest detachment. It must be fifteen hundred men.” Cocco was William Gold, one of Hawkwood’s lieutenants – so named because he had started his career as an army cook. Fia had always thought that, but for the broader distances between them, she might find good converts among the enemy. They, too, respected ability over birth.

Fia’s heart jumped ahead a beat when he pointed out Cardinal Robert of Geneva’s red banner. Once again, she was too aware of her deficit of spies. “Back so soon after Faenza and Cesena?” she asked. Given his reputation, the blame for any atrocities Hawkwood’s army committed would fall immediately on him.

“He wants to be pope,” Antonov murmured. Explanation enough. While the papacy lived in Avignon, it still had ambitions in Italy, territories to reclaim, lords to cow.

Other officers pointed to Robert’s regiment, laughing. She heard the edge underneath. Her men had all killed just as readily as Cardinal Robert, if not on the same scale. Yet their outrage was not feigned. The axis of morality was just one more way that men, even bloodthirsty men, used to hold themselves above one another. There were few limits in war, but it was easy to imagine that those other men had crossed, and that you had not, made them evil, and you just pragmatic.

“I’ll lead the charge against Bloody Robert,” Fia said. “Who’d like to join?” She waited out the chorus of volunteers, and selected the only man who hadn’t joined. He was the only one she could count on not to go charging off after his own glory.

As always, Antonov could have countermanded her. Instead, he said, “Robert seems to be expecting attention. He’s in a position he could pull back to be recessed of center.”

“If he’s expecting it, he won’t think anything awry,” Fia said.

 

The first claps of thunder lashed the horizon before Fia reached the bulk of the company. They were from no lightning.

Knots of smoke rose from the company’s lines. As Hawkwood’s lines approached, the men at Fia’s vanguard had parted to reveal the squat, bell-shaped cannon concealed behind them. A third and then a fourth report echoed off the ridges.

Fia allowed herself a moment of satisfaction. The “free lease” of artillery and contracts for crews had been a non-negotiable clause of Siena’s surrender. She had insisted.

The stone shot had not made any impact on Hawkwood’s line, but their advance faltered. Men fell out of marching order. Hawkwood’s English veterans would hold, but his French, German, and papal recruits had likely never heard such a noise.

Constantin Laskaris held the center line. She dismounted by him. Caterina did likewise, and immediately bolted to find Fia’s courser.

Laskaris had not been sleeping well. He never did before battle. The shadows under his eyes were like the sockets of a skull. But his voice was steady. “Their skirmishers keep coming close, but they hold just out of crossbow range. They’re making a point of taunting us. They’re yelling that they have a stake ready to fire for you.”

Given the number of Frenchmen in Hawkwood’s army, it would have been impolitic for Hawkwood’s men to mention Jeanne d’Arc by name. But the example was clear enough. Englishmen had killed her, too.

Fia said, “They’re trying to tempt me into attacking. I’ll let them think they’ve done it. But no officer is to charge past me under pain of losing their share of Sienese booty.” For condottieri, as compelling a threat as death. “Pikemen and crossbowmen to the front. Cavalry stay behind.” The cavalrymen were the richest among the company, and therefore the ones she least trusted to follow humiliating orders. The experienced rank-and-file, however, thought of lives over glory.

One of the Company of the Star’s most potent tactics against untested soldiers was to provoke an attack, feign retreat, and then surround and annihilate the pursuers. Now Hawkwood was trying the same on her. It was insulting. Somehow Hawkwood and Cardinal Robert seemed to have gotten the idea that she was unseasoned.

Unless, of course, they were expecting her to see through this, and had something else in mind. She so rarely fought condottieri of Hawkwood’s class that she felt unsteady in her footing.

Caterina brought her remaining armor and her brown courser. She donned her gauntlet and gloves while her courser fought Caterina, jerking its head, and bashing it into her shoulder. She had not had the time to properly acclimate the company’s horses to the sound of cannon fire. Practice would have alerted Hawkwood’s many spies. Her courser calmed only when she climbed on his back. She slipped her helm on, visor down.

Finally, she hoisted her commander’s baton, and rode to the van. Corporals and sergeants barked as she passed, ordering their lines to reform around her. Laskaris’s order was getting around.

As she rode past the front lines, a few crossbow bolts bit the dirt about her. None landed closer than thirty feet. A taunt. She was meant to charge now that it appeared it would be another minute before those skirmishers could rewind their weapons.

She waved her baton, and rode.

From out ahead, she got a better look at the field. Her battle lines had folded into a crescent. So had Hawkwood’s. On an unopposed march, the wings would meet first. Their formations were offset from each other, though, and Hawkwood’s was outsized. But nobody was marching. Fia’s men did not travel farther than her.

The enemy was waiting for her to come out from the center, just like this, and pincer her. She did not have long to study their disposition before more trees and hills interceded. Hawkwood’s skirmishers had chosen this route for that reason. She wouldn’t be able to see his wings as they folded on her.

The enemy crossbowmen who’d already fired ran behind their comrades, who knelt and took aim. They were still too far to fire with much effect, though this time Fia heard a gasp and choke behind her. They were tantalizingly close. A fast cavalry sweep would knock them down…

Surrounded by walls of trees, she felt blinded. A nervous tension burned her legs, and got worse each second she stayed. She waited until just after it became unbearable. Then she held her baton up, flat, and waved it backward. Halt and retreat.

She’d given the signal just in time. She saw, as she returned to a clearer part of the battlefield, that the enemy wings had moved faster than she’d guessed. In the time since she’d lost sight of them, they’d covered half the distance they’d needed to pincer her. The same trees that had blinded her to them had also kept them from seeing that she had retreated until it was nearly too late.

Her soldiers on the wings were rushing headlong to meet them.

Hawkwood’s men had taken themselves out of the ideal alignment to face a frontal assault. Their heavy cavalry had sprung toward Fia’s position, leaving their infantrymen open. The company’s skirmishers rode within range, dismounted, and loosed a storm of projectiles.

The company landed a good sucker punch, but hardly decisive. By the time she returned to where she’d started, the enemy’s cavalry had doubled back to their positions, and her men had fallen back.

Before long, the skirmishers crawled forward again, firing. Taunting. Fia pretended once more to chase after them. Again, their wings fell out of formation. Her men darted out to meet them, though this time Hawkwood’s men had left some of their cavalry behind. The Company of the Star scored a handful of casualties, but little else.

Upon her return to the battle lines, she turned commander of the center skirmishers over to the corporal she’d brought with her, the only man who hadn’t volunteered to fight Bloody Robert. Now that she’d demonstrated how to dance, he had little trouble following suit. Test them like they thought they were testing her, tire them out. Fia led the infantry who’d accompanied her to the water carts. Fresh troops took their place.

She rode back to the rear, hoping to find Antonov. She found Laskaris instead. “We can’t keep that up for hours,” Laskaris pointed out.

“Neither can they,” she said. From back here, she had a good enough view of the front lines – enough to see that the enemy, in their dance, had covered more distance than her men. She wondered how long it would be before they figured out that she wasn’t taking their bait or probing for weaknesses – she was just exhausting them. Stalling.

Her only strategy was to delay. The Company of the Star only needed to hold Hawkwood and Robert long enough for her next strike to land.

It was long enough in coming.

The sky grayed, shadowed. The rain clouds got near enough to provide shade. For a while she worried rain would come and revitalize the enemy, wasting her efforts at tiring them. Then she saw the motion she’d been waiting for: a wavering in the enemy’s rear, a heat mirage. She could not see individual men from this distance, but soon they moved in bulk, like water receding from a beach. Groups of men peeled off from Hawkwood’s rear in pell-mell order. The cluster of men to the far west that Laskaris identified as Hawkwood’s reserves were also moving.

She was watching so closely that she nearly didn’t see Antonov arrive. He’d come from the direction of the Via Francigena. Messengers coming down the road would have found him first.

She asked, “The stradiots found their mark?” He nodded.

Her army looked small when it stood against Hawkwood’s – but it should not have looked this small. She’d kept her heavy cavalry and infantry close at hand. The moment she’d heard Hawkwood had departed the road, she’d sent her stradiots along the other side.

Like her, Hawkwood was accustomed to fighting the defenders of cities, or native condottieri. Conventional Italian armies. But the Company of the Star was not conventional, and its leadership was just as foreign as he was. He had not often fought light cavalry as crude, swift, and effective as Albanian stradiots. She had sent them after Hawkwood’s treasure train.

Like her, he had accumulated riches as he had pillaged his way through Italy. He dragged them with him. He did not trust the papacy enough to transport it back to Avignon. Her scouts had located his train fifteen miles behind the main body of his force. It was guarded, but not sufficiently so against massed attack.

Now word of the attack had reached Hawkwood’s front lines, too. Hawkwood wasn’t the only commander to keep his treasure with the train. His other companies’ captains, his own contracted condottieri, kept their property on the treasure train. Their loot was what was important to them. Not the battle. His reserves were breaking.

Now both of the enemy’s wings formed into marching order. Hawkwood or Robert, or both, must have lost patience with skirmishing, trying to lure Fia into a trap. The furious shouts of their officers carried across the land.

As blood seeping from an open wound, the enemy began to advance. Slow, at first.

The Sienese artillery fired again. All six cannons sounded in rapid succession. Two gaps abruptly split the enemy’s right flank. None of the other shots had any effect that she saw.

One of the blasts had not sounded right. One of the artillery piece’s plumes of smoke was twice as large, gnarled by twisted roots: the debris trails of something large blasting apart. A cannon had misfired, exploded. The smoke covered at least a dozen men. Fia wondered how many had died.

Tension squeezed her chest. Hawkwood’s army looked so vastly huge against hers, and, for the first time, she wondered if she should have sent the stradiots away. But the stradiots were not well matched against Hawkwood’s heavy cavalry.

She placed her hand on the cantle of her horse’s saddle, but did not haul herself up. This battle would not end with the initial clash. The older she got, the more she was aware of how limited her energy was. She needed to hold herself in reserve.

She did not have to wait long.

Another of Antonov’s messengers found him, and far faster than she would have expected news to travel fifteen miles. Antonov listened, shaken. The stubble outlining his mustache stood out all the stronger against his pale cheeks. He said, “I sent this man only an hour ago. He had to turn back. The Via Francigena has been cut off.” A body of men, light skirmishers and armored pikemen, had appeared as if from nowhere. They flew the banner of the Company of Saint George.

So her army was not the only one that looked smaller than it should have. Hawkwood, too, must have been missing a number of his regular cavalry and pikemen. Fia and Antonov spent a minute figuring out what must have happened. Hawkwood had left them in concealment to the east of the Via Francigena. An ambush. He’d known that she was sending men that way.

She’d still caught him off guard. He must have been expecting her to try to flank him. He’d positioned his ambush to cut off regular infantry and cavalry. He hadn’t realized that she would send raiders straight through to his treasure train. The stradiots had ridden right past the ambush. But now Hawkwood’s men were moving to cut off the stradiots’ retreat.

If she knew her stradiots, she wouldn’t see many of them again. When they saw that the road had been blocked, they would take whatever treasure they’d stolen and keep going. That had always been the risk of sending crude foreigners after a rich target. But her strategy had been so rigid she’d had to count on getting them back. And now…

“I didn’t give those riders their orders until late last night.” Only her officers knew where the stradiots had gone. Even Antonov had only known later. It had been one of her many plans he’d only given his acquiescence. An ambush like that took time to set up. Hawkwood would have had to have given his orders at the same time she’d given hers. “Finding that out would take more than spies. It would take–”

Abject treachery, her inner voice supplied.

Someone very close, intimate to her, would have to have told them. Not Antonov. Not Laskaris. Even they had found out too late.

Her inner voice did not deny the idea that came to her.

Before Laskaris could answer, she said, “Never mind. Best we can count on now is for the stradiots to be a distraction.”

Laskaris’s mustache dripped with sweat. “What do we do now?”

“Charge,” she said. It was a terrible idea, but it was better than staying still. There was a very slim path forward, like an escarpment: solid rock to one side, and an unguarded fall on the other. “We’ll win through strength of arms. We tired out their vanguard. And we drove a good part of their reserves away. If any of the stradiots are able to make it through, we’ll pinch them between us.”

“They can’t,” Antonov said. “They won’t.”

The stradiots had likely already scattered. And if the men Hawkwood had sent to hold the road turned back and joined the fight, the weight of the enemy’s numbers would be impossible to hold back.

Already, the tips of the armies’ flanks met, clashed, and curled around each other. But Hawkwood’s army was larger. He was bracketing the Company of the Star. The screams carried over the barking officers. Hawkwood’s flanks would envelop her army if they did not find a way to straighten their ranks.

She glanced to Antonov and Laskaris. Laskaris seemed frozen. No color had returned to Antonov’s face.

“We’re not dead men yet,” she told them, though she knew they couldn’t believe her. She seized her baton from under her arm and rode ahead, toward the center lines. She did not look back.

Smoke poured over the battlefield. The Sienese cannon coughed soot and ash. The misfired cannon had sparked a fire. Fia felt as though she had ridden into an ocean. The battle was a gray sea under gray clouds. Waves of smoke curlicued overhead. Enough to get lost in.

Her inner voice whispered to her, helping her keep her bearings, telling her where to go.

She used her baton to lash men about their shoulders or helmets, and yelled for everyone who could hear her to rush to the wings. She pulled through a bank of smoke. Suddenly the enemy was ahead, less than a stone’s toss away.

Steel men on armored horses turned to her. The infantry following her planted their pikes in the ground, braced to receive a charge. Bolts split the air, peppered the ground.

Her visor hid everything except what was in front of her. She had no idea what was happening on the other wing, or the overall state of the battle. She knew with a sudden and weighty certainty that she had been herded here.

The battle had been lost the moment Hawkwood had cut off her stradiots. Or before, when she had failed to subdue Siena. Her enemy moved with a swiftness that meant that someone had fed them information.

And she knew who had betrayed her.

Her inner voice was real. She had always treated it as such, even as she recognized that it seemed just as much within her as her own thoughts. It knew too much. It said too many things she couldn’t have invented.

She had never, until now, grappled with the implications of that. If it was real, then of course it could talk to other people, too. It had just, until now, not chosen to.

Her inner voice started to speak. It never finished the first word.

It screamed.

Lightning strobed overhead, blinding white and searing hot.

She reflexively clapped her hands over her helm to try to block the scream inside her head, but that wouldn’t have worked even had the noise been real.

There was a second flash, and then a third, but no bolt. She heard no thunder. The clouds pulsed with light but remained silent. No thunder. It was not because the scream blotted the noise. The scream was a thought, not a sound. She could hear the yells of the men about her, the snap of the crossbows.

Silence reigned in the skies. The sky was livid with light, but she was sure that whatever was happening wasn’t a storm. The shriek died away.

Half of her men’s eyes had turned skyward. So had the enemy’s. Only those locked sword-in-shield continued to fight. The nearest men looked to her for a signal, some cue as to how they should respond. Even some of the enemy glanced to her.

She wished she knew. She did not realize she had made a decision until she raised her baton. She hurled it.

It pirouetted end-over-end and landed behind one of Hawkwood’s bannermen.

The only way she was going to get her baton back was by charging Hawkwood’s lines.

Most of the enemy were too distracted to see what she had done, but her men weren’t. She’d made a statement. The shout they raised finally deafened the silence of the sky, and in her head. Fia slammed her boot into her courser’s side, and rode.