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A lesser man might have found this awkward. Anne bustled around, bringing him his gauntlets and helping Squire Kevin fasten his greaves, while Muriel lounged against the window seat, taking it all in with a practiced expression of maternal indulgence. Her first spark of true emotion came when Anne tried to bring him his sword.
Muriel sprang forward to stop the girl. “No, my dear,” she said, with a cold grin. “That’s my job.” Then she took the weapon, brushed a few imaginary specks of dust from the jeweled scabbard, and handed it to him with an elaborate curtsy.
As Muriel helped Stanley and Kevin adjust Broderick’s sword belt, Anne stood back with a venomous look on her face, which quickly changed to a smile when she saw her lover watching her. Broderick knew it was past time to have a talk with the girl. But that would have to wait until after the battle.
Some servant brought in a new bottle of wine. Broderick barely registered the man’s presence, but Anne immediately noticed the alcohol.
“Oh, let’s have a drink, shall we?”
She poured several cups and tried to bring one to Broderick, though Muriel insisted on being the one to give him that, as well. Maybe he would need to have a talk with his wife, too. Yes, there were certain forms and traditions where knights and their ladies were concerned, but Muriel had never been such a stickler for such things before. He could count on one hand the number of times she’d come to see him off during the Loshadnarodski War. Generally, when he left for battle, she was warming some other man’s bed.
“Yes, why don’t we have a toast, then?” Muriel raised her cup and said, “To my husband and my king, on the day of his final victory.”
They raised their glasses—all except Anne, who immediately started drinking her wine, perhaps out of pure spite.
The servants’ door burst open, and William Aitken shot out. He sprinted across the room and knocked Broderick’s wine cup to the floor. “Don’t drink it!” he cried.
Muriel frowned into her cup. Kevin and Stanley set theirs aside, looking alarmed. But Anne had turned to pour herself a second glass. “Why? What’s wrong with it?” she asked, taking another sip.
They all stood there, looking back and forth at each other. William straightened up and poked at the broken cup on the floor with his boot. “My apologies, my lord. I thought....”
Before he could finish his sentence, Anne gave a strangled cry and started coughing. Muriel shot her a disapproving look, clearly thinking the girl was making a joke. But then Anne spat up blood and started shaking. Her eyes bulged as she saw the blood on her dress and hands, and she staggered forward, clutching for Muriel’s arm and trying to say something.
Muriel stepped back as Anne fell to her knees and curled over onto the floor, clutching her midriff and rattling horribly.
Broderick, his squires, and William all jumped forward to help the girl, but Muriel stood there, watching.
“If I were you,” she said, “I would try to find that page who brought the wine.”
“I think it was Sir Robert Tynsdale,” said William.
“H’m...I thought he looked familiar,” said Muriel in a quiet voice. She picked up her wine cup again and sniffed it.
The squires went running, and soldiers were summoned, but there was no sign of the page anywhere. Anne was still writhing on the floor, gritting her teeth while blood spurted through them. A physician came, and he forced charcoal into Anne’s throat, which made her vomit in long, bloody geysers. The physician wanted her put in a bed, so Broderick ordered her carried to his. Her legs and arms shook so much that Kevin and Stanley had trouble picking her up, and the poor girl fell to the floor several times.
“Not the most propitious start to the day,” said Muriel calmly, stepping over the mess on the floor. “But hopefully things will improve from here.” She patted Broderick’s cheek. “Go on, now. I’ll look after her. You have a battle to fight.”
There was no way to argue with that. Anne would have far better care than the hundreds of men who were about to fall, and his army needed him. Kevin and Stanley were still white faced and trembling when they joined him on the way down to the stables, but Broderick felt a sense of perfect, almost spiritual calm.
His entire life had led up to this day—all the battles, all the twisted plots, all the backroom deals. Today he—and the whole kingdom—were going to find out if Finster’s Book had been right. And next to that, the life of Anne Meriwether was completely insignificant.
He put her out of his mind as if she had died years ago. Then he and William and his squires rode down to the cathedral, where two companies of his own household cavalry were mustered. He’d paid them with borrowed money earlier in the week, and bought them all new velvet surcoats with the jet-black eagle of his house, and they greeted him with an enthusiastic round of cheers.
“Let’s see if they’re still cheering me when this is over,” he thought. It didn’t take any great skill to start a war—old King Edgar was proof of that. It was finishing one that proved so difficult.
“After today,” he told the knights, “I’m going to remember who was here with me and who stayed home. This is going to be a new Myrcia, where what matters is what you did for your king, not who your grandfather was.”
They cheered that, too, and the rest of his little speech, and fortunately no one dared point out that Broderick’s grandfathers were a king and a baron.
Then he spurred and wheeled his horse—a nice effect—and led them at a fast trot down through the southern gate and up Morwyn Hill into Osricksburg, where nearly all the rest of his cavalry was waiting. Rank on rank of men and horses, and big clustered squares of pikemen and archers, all under his command. Down the other side of the hill, on the riverbank, he could see boat after boat unloading the Newshire men. Long lines of the enemy were spreading out into the river flats. Tents were going up, too, and here and there, he could see squads of men—probably Odelandic thralls—digging trenches.
There were a lot more of the Newshire men across the river than he had expected. Colonel Rath guessed three thousand, which was nearly as many as Broderick had with him. William guessed thirty-five hundred.
To compound the problem, one of Rath’s scouts rode up with the news that the Keelshire and Trahernshire men under the Duke of Leornian were starting to cross the Upper Trahern, off to the northeast of the city.
“But they’re moving much more slowly, my lord,” the scout assured him.
They had fewer boats, and they were taking their time, digging in for a siege and setting up their camps, instead of riding immediately to the attack. Thank Earstien for small favors.
“Any news of Lukas?” Broderick asked, looking at Rath and the captains.
None of them had heard anything, and when he peered off to the south, past the Newshire troops, he could see nothing but a rippling haze of heat. He sighed. Waiting was dangerous—if the two enemy armies could link up and encircle the city, Lukas might not be able to break through their lines. Broderick and all his supporters would be starved into submission.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said. “We can’t sit here all day. Sound the advance.”
The trumpets blared, and all his cavalry started down the hill at a slow walk. First Broderick’s own men and the household knights of the Duke of Haydonshire. Then a motley group of knights and barons—all his supporters from the Gemot—followed by the city troops that Colonel Rath had raised and trained. Dust rose in clouds around them. The heat hammered down on their helmets, and all their dozens of banners hung limp in the still, sweltering air.
Below, the Newshire men saw them coming, and hurried to form ranks. Archers and pikemen rushed forward, and there was the usual mad jumble as some regiments went the wrong way and ended up intermingled with others. But by and large, the Newshire men lived up to their reputation. They hadn’t had more than a minute’s notice, and yet in most places, they already stood in neat rows, calmly waiting with their pikes or setting out their arrows. Broderick had always loved leading the Newshire men in combat, and he heartily wished he had more of them on his side, and fewer green troops plucked from the back alleys of the capital.
About a third of the way down the hill, Broderick raised his sword, and trumpets sounded the charge—their notes drowned out in seconds by the reverberating thunder of two thousand horsemen all breaking into a gallop. Now the flags and banners fluttered free, with the arms of all the great houses of the south, and some of the men raised a long, howling cheer, the way the Loshadnarodski barbarians did. Broderick smiled, feeling that curious sense of peace and contentment that always settled on him at these moments.
They hit the Newshire lines in a rush, blasting through and crushing men to dust under their hooves. Broderick batted aside a pike some fellow tried to stick in his chest and took the man’s head off with a careless backhanded stroke. The enemy were running, and there was another cheer—a throaty, bloodthirsty one—but it all felt too easy, and of course it was.
He saw another line of archers and pikemen, and another behind that, and before Rath and his captains could get the inexperienced city riders back into their lines, the arrows started falling like hail. To Broderick’s right, no more than six feet away, some luckless knight from Haydonshire got peppered with six arrows in two seconds.
There was a loud clang, and a rattling noise through Broderick’s skull and teeth, and he found an arrow had lodged itself in the hinge of his helmet visor. He tugged and wrenched at it, but it was completely stuck.
Turning in his saddle, he found Rath and shouted, “Retreat and regroup. Back up the hill now.” Their charge had run out of momentum, and they had no chance at breaching two more lines in their current state of confusion.
He heard a sharp whistling sound, right by his head, and his horse shuddered, stopped, and stumbled. There was an arrow—a big one with a shaft the width of his thumb—right into the poor animal’s head. He felt the horse start to go over, and he barely got his foot free of the stirrup in time to avoid being trapped. Moving instinctively, from years of training and practice, he tucked his arms in and let himself roll with the fall. Even so, his helmet struck something quite solid, and he could hardly move.
When he managed to raise himself a bit, he found he’d landed on the severed head of some Newshire pikeman. “Maybe the one I killed,” he thought. “Wouldn’t that be amusing?”
Getting to his feet was difficult. Maybe he was getting too old for this sort of thing. To the south, he could see the enemy pikemen advancing. To the north, he could see his own cavalry, trotting away from him. With a sinking feeling, he realized no one had seen him fall.
No, actually lots of people had seen him fall. But they were all Newshire men, apparently. An arrow clanged off his breastplate, and another off his left pauldron. He started trotting away on foot, but then stopped and turned back. If he was going to die, he was going to make them do it to his face, not let them skewer him through the back like a coward.
“So much for the Black Eagle rising,” he thought. “If they let me live, I’ll put a note on that damned book telling future kings not to bother with it.”
Another volley of arrows, and this time one found its way through a joint and into his shoulder. It stung like a hornet, and he remembered how much he had always hated getting wounded. He drew his sword and shook it at the advancing enemy.
“Come on, you sons-of-bitches!” he shouted. “Come and get me!”
How many could he take with him? Ten? Twenty. He hoped at least twenty. That would make a good song someday.
Then he heard galloping hooves, veering in from his side, and he turned to see Sir William bearing down on him. William shifted in his saddle, reached out a hand, and grabbed Broderick by the sword belt, yanking him unceremoniously into the air and throwing him across his pommel.
So Broderick made his first retreat of the day jostled and aching, with an arrow in his shoulder and his ass in the air. To borrow Muriel’s phrase, it wasn’t the most propitious start. At least he was still alive, though, and that was something.