Baron Aymon arrived just before noon, having pushed his fifty soldiers hard through the night after the escorted prisoner reached him. He'd expected to find his son held hostage and in need of ransoming. What the scout told him instead left him standing in the road with his mind entirely blank.
A twenty-man unit of conscripts, trained for less than a month, had defeated and captured Baron Eaton's force of over sixty men — knights included.
He couldn't make it add up. He considered the possibilities as he marched the remaining distance, and kept coming back to the wandering swordsman Felix had apparently recruited. A rogue who used magic. That was the only explanation he could find.
Felix rode out to meet him when word came of his approach. Aymon kept his questions for the privacy of the command tent, where Felix walked him through the fire attack step by step. Aymon listened, asked his questions, and when he had his answers, let out a long breath.
"This can't become a regular method. You understand that."
"I understand. I wouldn't have done it if the odds weren't so badly against us."
Evan noted the Baron's expression and didn't particularly mind it. He wasn't in Aymon's service and didn't intend to be. He had helped Felix, and that was as far as it went. He watched these minor lords with their minor wars and their elaborate codes of conduct and felt the distance between his frame of reference and theirs — not contempt exactly, but a gap that couldn't quite be closed.
The Baron glanced at Evan once, briefly, with an expression that covered a more complicated reaction. Evan met it without adjusting his own and looked away.
Felix, sensing the atmosphere, moved quickly to better ground: "Father — Bess has reached Mage rank. Fourth level, water element."
The change in Aymon was immediate. He thanked the Prime Lord, the archangel Majeri, and his ancestors in quick succession, and told Bess her title and salary were changing as of that moment. A mage produced by a noble household's own investment was worth celebrating — most noble families never managed it, and the ones that did spoke of it for years.
The explanation for the divine hierarchy the archangels belonged to surfaced in his gratitude: the Prime Church had absorbed the old elemental gods into its own structure over eighteen hundred years, recasting them as archangels under the Prime Lord — Sando for light, Mondelo for wind, Marci for fire, Dutt for earth, Ozu for lightning, Hedi for dark, Slon for space, Taimu for time, and Majeri for water among them. The strategy had kept most mages from feeling they stood in opposition to the Church, a political achievement the founders had clearly been proud of.
Eaton was brought forward. The two barons greeted each other with the elaborate courtesy of enemies who expected to meet again, and sat down to negotiate. Evan watched the performance — the careful face-keeping, the ritualized respect between men who had just been trying to kill each other — and went outside.
Felix found him that evening. "Mr. Evan — that wasn't what I wanted. Don't let it bother you."
"I'm not bothered. Rest early — we march to Nabi Keep tomorrow."
"The victories are yours. Both of them. I haven't forgotten."
"Don't say that," Evan said. "Plans aren't victories. The men who executed them are the ones who won. Get some sleep."
The following morning the column set out in good spirits — Felix's twenty soldiers moving with the ease of men who had fought twice and been paid for both, the battle-share having settled any question they might have had about whether they'd chosen the right standard to follow. The prisoners came along under guard. The road ahead was clear.
They hadn't gone far when a scout intercepted a lone traveler: a mercenary, it turned out, making directly for them with a sealed letter. The man had confirmed their identity and produced the letter from inside his coat. It bore Count Rein's seal.
Aymon read it and his face changed.
Nabi Keep — Rein's military stronghold, the fortified position he'd chosen as his headquarters — was surrounded. Viscount Beale, the man they called One-Eye Beale for the patch he'd worn since losing his left eye in a skirmish fifteen years ago, had broken through Rein's defensive lines with a force of nine hundred men and appeared without warning before the Keep's walls. The garrison inside numbered three hundred. A mercenary company had lowered men by rope in the night to go for help.
Aymon's own force stood at seventy or eighty, with a handful of prisoners and no cavalry to speak of — Federik had taken the knights in ahead and was reportedly already inside the Keep, having lost five of them cutting through at the siege's start.
Aymon looked at the messenger mercenary. His expression went somewhere Evan recognized.
Felix spoke before his father could act on it: "Father. We should move to reinforce Count Rein."
Aymon took a breath and came back from wherever he'd gone. He was right — even if he silenced the messenger, seventy men had heard the letter read aloud. There was no containing it. He looked at the terrain ahead and let the thought go.
"What do you know about Beale?" Evan asked.
Rein answered without being prompted — the knight had served near the man before and had opinions. Beale was capable and experienced, and since the eye had gone he'd become quicker to read ambiguous information as threatening. The hair-trigger suspicion was his weakness.
Evan felt the shape of something beginning to form.
"Show me the maps," he said.