It was easy to differentiate the Imperial Patrols across the bridge, caught off-guard, their pale cloaks flashing like the underbellies of fish as they fought back. Yet the Red Tigress’s army was relentless. Lines of non-Affinite soldiers surged forward, razing down the guards with their numbers and clearing the bridge.
Ana’s unit of Affinites charged, pummeling the gates with stone, flames, ice, earth, wood. Ramson combed the crowd for Ana and Daya, wishing once again that he were there with them.
But he was needed elsewhere, and the calling came soon enough.
On the pale, crenellated walls of the Palace, between the parapets, Ramson caught flashes of movement. A glint of silver here, a glimmer of white there.
Archers. His and Ana’s first Palace break-in attempt had beencrucial in planning for the siege; they’d been able to point out all defenses that the Salskoff Palace employed. Security had tightened since Morganya had ascended the throne—they’d run into several Patrols in the streets of Salskoff alone—and there was no telling what tricks the mad monarch had up her sleeves…but this was a start.
Ramson raised his hand; he knew the captains of the other archery sectors would be doing the same, defending their quadrant and taking out any threats that could stop the Affinite squad from getting through the Palace gates. Behind him, there was asurge of movement as the archers in his squad nocked their arrows.
Ramson swung his arm down. Hundreds of arrows took flight with a uniform hiss, arcing through the air for the Palace walls. Most crashed against the crenellations—a weakness in their strategy that Ramson and the other Bregonian commanders had foreseen, for the Salskoff guards held the high ground.
Sure enough, the counterattack came: a volley of arrows hurtling across the night sky, glowing as red as embers, straight toward them.
Ramson flung his shield over his head. “The arrows are on fire!” he bellowed. “Take cover!”
The arrows whistled between them in streaks of light—only, there was a second trick to them that Ramson hadn’t expected. As they hit the ground, they seemed to burst, liquid splattering from pouches attached to their sheaths. The smell was familiar—and it took Ramson a half second to understand what it was.
Flames roared to life across the pools of oil drenching the snow, rearing bright and hot and encircling his army. Ramsonbarely had time to scramble away from a growing fire when he heard another uniformwhooshbehind him.
He turned to see the next barrage descending upon them.
He raised his shield—but this time, the impact knocked him completely off his feet.
When he blinked again, he was shaking snow and mud from his face; his shield was completely torn apart and strewn in pieces next to him, his hand bleeding from the splinters of blackstone and metal. All around him, the ground shook, and his line was in utter chaos. The air was filled with the screams of his men as they were hit, as the flames clung to their armor and began to burn them alive.
There was a faint ringing in his ears as he climbed to his feet unsteadily, the world weaving in and out of focus. Someone familiar stood in front of him; Narron was shouting orders at his men for them to retreat behind the burning riverside promenade.
Ramson’s deputy caught sight of him and yelled, “Explosive powder!”
“I know!” Ramson roared. “Take cov—”
The ground where Narron stood ruptured in a cloud of vaporized snow and silt.
“NARRON!”Ramson lurched forward, keeping an eye on the battlements from the Palace and another on the maze of fire that his sector had turned into. Between the mist and smoke, he found his young deputy: unmoving, face unrecognizable beneath a layer of blood and mud.
Ramson hoisted the boy into his arms and began to drag him away from the bombardment. Across the bridge, the assault on the front gates had not stopped—only, now, the archers on thewalls were beginning to turn their attention to the army on the bridge. There were more, now, Ramson realized; he’d seen signal fires lit between the parapets, and as he watched, there came additional movement between the crenellations.
To get into the Palace, Ana and the Affinites were relying on his squad and the other battalions to engage the guards on the walls.
Barely five minutes into the battle, and Ramson was already failing.
Another deafening explosion struck so close that his teeth rattled. Ramson set Narron against the stone balustrade of the riverside promenade.
The boy wasn’t breathing.
Ramson had no time for grief. He chanced a look over the railing and, seeing no movement on the other side, stood and raised his arm.“FIRE!”
His men—those that were still standing—let loose a volley of arrows, yet the ones that found their marks were few and far between. Smoke and heat pressed in on their battalion from all sides, and in the momentary break between attack and counterattack, Ramson took in the scene. The careful formation of his battalion was gone; here and there, he saw bodies of his fellow Bregonian commanders, their badges streaked with blood. Soldiers crouched over their fallen and injured comrades, some of whom were barely out of boyhood, their soft weeping intertwined with the crackle and spit of flames all around.
Half their battalion was wiped out.
And as there came uniform movement on the other side of the walls, Ramson turned to face the Palace with a sense of dread.
That was when it happened.
As another volley of flaming arrows shot toward them, someone darted past the battlefield of fallen soldiers. It was a girl Ramson had never seen before, barely out of her childhood. She skipped and skidded over the flaming puddles of fire, and where her fingers pointed, ice bloomed from the ground, meeting and extinguishing flames.
