2nd Corps Command Tents
The Battle of Orstead
They strode through slush and mud, amid a buzzing throng of Sarresant troops, each seeming to go their own way, like a choreographed dance meant to mimic chaos while the troupe changed the scenery around them on the stage.
“Where is d’Arrent?” Sarine said, stopping a soldier with four stripes on his sleeves. “I need to find the High Commander at once.”
The soldier gave her a curious look and said something in the Sarresant tongue, gesturing toward a clustering of tents before he pulled away.
Tigai trailed behind Sarine as she carved a path through the swarm. Every soldier seemed to have a task, or perhaps four tasks, all competing for their attentions. Tents were being struck, horses led in teams, wagons loaded and hitched and rolled through the masses swirling around them.
“Can’t you do something to calm this?” he asked as he tried to match her pace.
The question served to slow her for a fraction. “I … could, I suppose,” Sarine said. “But this isn’t Yellow. They’re excited, nervous, full of pride and duty. If I used Green it might interfere with their work.”
It looked more like a retreat, so far as he could see. But whatever Sarine’s strange notions of colors and emotions, she’d resumed her pace, pulling him on toward the few remaining tents without soldiers pulling up their stakes and rope. She pushed through them as though she belonged in spite of her civilian’s clothes, until finally one of the soldiers noticed their approach, though the reaction was less the hostile order to halt and state their business he’d expected, and more a sort of reverent awe.
“Sarine?” the woman who’d noticed them said. “Mes Dieux, ce ne peut être que vous.”
“General Vassail,” Sarine replied. “Thank the Gods. Where is High Commander d’Arrent? Tigai told me there were kaas-mages here, with the enemy. I came to help.”
The woman—General Vassail, apparently—responded in a flurry of the Sarresant tongue, ushering them both inside one of the larger tents, where half a dozen ornately insignia’d men and women stood around them, debating and pointing and leaving him not understanding a word of it. Instead he occupied himself looking down at their maps, and those he could read easily enough: blue bars, for where the Sarresant troops had to be, pushing eastward across an open field facing a double half circle of ridges where a single blue dot had been drawn, surrounded by green. More green bars had been placed on either side of the ridges, and the numbers might have looked favorable for the Sarresant troops, were it not for the equally sized force of red and yellow bars approaching from the south.
They were on the verge of a defeat.
Little doubt remained, after witnessing the frenetic pace of their camp. Their command tents had been placed too close to the front. A vindication of every caution he’d given Mei. They’d picked the wrong side, and whatever her assurances that havens could be found even in defeat, it reeked of a sour end, when the Yanjin family had endured enough already. His thoughts drifted to the starfield, to the old man limned by shadows. If they were doomed to be set in magi chains, better, perhaps, to know the nature of the bargain. Better to stop running, and accept that he was not some powerless waif. He could affect the world as he wanted to see it, if he had the courage to try.
“You’re here, thank the wind spirits.”
He turned and almost jumped back, as two newcomers to the tent had taken up a place beside him. One a man he didn’t recognize; the other, the Fox magi, Fei Zan, masked as Voren, whose knife he could still feel lodged in his heart, in phantom aches triggered by the sight of his face.
“I feared you’d abandoned us, boy,” Fei Zan said, speaking Jun in quiet tones as the rest of the table had devolved into rapid exchanges in the Sarresant tongue.
“Not yet,” he said. “But what’s … this?” He gestured toward the maps. “It looks as though we’re bloody fucked.”
“It looks as grim as it is,” Fei Zan said. “But with you here, and the girl, there is hope.”
“Lord Tigai,” one of the women said from across the table. He looked up and saw golden eyes staring back.
“D’Arrent needs us,” Sarine said to him, translating what the woman with golden light for eyes had said. “But I don’t know the limitations of the starfield—can we move into the path of the Thellan army? I can put up wardings to stop their kaas-mages scattering our lines, so long as I can get there.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Tigai said. “I can only take us to anchors. Places I’ve been, or places where there are already stars.”
Sarine repeated what he’d said for the table’s benefit, followed by a rapid exchange in the Sarresant tongue between the Empress’s vessel and several of the generals.
“You must find a way,” Fei Zan said to him privately. “Whatever the girl needs, you must take her where she needs to go.”
“Like I said, it doesn’t work that way. I can’t—”
“Do you understand what is at stake here?” Fei Zan snapped. “We may already have run out of time. Unless d’Arrent can crush these armies and move on their homelands, Paendurion will ascend, and all of our efforts are for nothing.”
“I can see lights, nearby, in the starfield,” Sarine was saying. “Lord Tigai, are those the anchors you’re speaking of?”
He frowned. There were only a handful of stars on this side of the Divide. He blinked and shifted his sight, remaining aware of both worlds at once.
“Those are old,” he said. “From where we traveled south; I set anchors along the way. But none are strong enough to use with the strands. It takes days, a strong familiarity, to convert an anchor to a star, even a dim one.”
“They’re here,” Sarine said in response to a question asked by d’Arrent’s vessel, tracing a line across one of the maps between the blue bars and the yellow. “Tigai says they were left by the path he took southward.”
Another burst of Sarresant speech, and Sarine answered it by nodding.
“Yes,” she said. “I think we can use them. But Tigai will need to do it; I won’t have the strength for both the wardings and the strands.”
“What?” he said. “Were you not listening? I told you, old anchors are worthless—they fade in a matter of hours. I’m surprised you can even see them.”
“I can … hold them,” Sarine said. “I’m not sure what the right word is. It’s like the wardings, but different. Look.”
He prepared another argument and felt it die before it formed.
The anchors—faint lights, like a guttering lantern at the bottom of a stairwell—shimmered against the blackness, a chain tracing the route he and Acherre and Fei Zan had taken south across this very field, some days before. Blue sparks punched through the anchors from behind, leaking trails of brilliant white light as strong as any star.
“How the fuck are you doing that?” he said.
“Can you take me between them?” Sarine asked. “One at a time. I’ll set wardings at each, and Anati can use Green to blunt the effects of the other kaas’ Yellow.”
He nodded, tasting ash on his tongue. No wonder the old man in the starfield wanted her dead.
“It won’t extend very far,” Sarine said to d’Arrent’s vessel. “But once I have anchors set, Anati and I can protect you here, along this line.” She traced it again on the map. “Fight here, and the kaas won’t affect your soldiers.”
Fei Zan clapped him on the shoulder. His mind still reeled from what Sarine had done. She’d as good as torn open new holes in the starfield, creating anchors from nothing. Everything he knew of his gift said it shouldn’t be possible, and yet he’d watched her do it.
Sarine extended a hand to him. “No sense delaying,” she said. “I’m ready when you are.”