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Ilyana had brought Stinky in close beside us. “Two arrows means they aren’t serious about it, right?” She didn’t sound any more sure of that than I was.

“You should probably keep farther back,” I said.

She shook her head. “I want them to see me. I’m kind of eye-catching, you know? It might at least make them stop to ask who we are.”

The soldiers were almost upon us. A small platoon broke off from the rest and rushed in our direction, weapons at the ready. That wasn’t promising. I didn’t think they were bothering to look at us too closely.

I shouted again, but none of them seemed to be paying attention. I was about to draw my sword and bring up as much stinging nettle as I could when someone called out, “Hold!”

The soldiers came to a sudden halt not five paces away from us.

One of them stepped out ahead of his comrades-in-arms. A captain, judging by the badge of office hanging from a chain around his neck.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Are you Sir Jules of Ecossia?”

“Uh…” It wasn’t a question I’d been expecting. “Yes?”

“I knew I recognized you!” he said excitedly. “I saw you joust against Sir Fishbeeshield in the tournament!”

“Oh, I—Wait, was Sir Fishbeeshield his actual name?”

“Yes, of course. Then you knocked Lord Skullshoulders right off his mount with a show jump! It was amazing. What are you doing out here? We almost killed you!”

“Well, there isn’t really time to explain, but…this is Ilyana the Golden.”

She coaxed Stinky a few paces forward. When the soldiers turned to look, she was met with the usual stunned silence. She didn’t wait for it to subside.

“The war has to stop. I need to see the emperor,” she said. “Right now.”

Chapter Thirty-One

The Technicality

While the rest of the army marched onward, the captain and his soldiers escorted us around the lines, moving with that odd lurching gait that let them keep pace with the horses. Stories from the last war usually had the Red Emperor leading his troops from the front, but that didn’t appear to be the case tonight. Well, come midnight, he’d be a mortal man, which made that sort of thing a bit riskier for him.

We’d just reached the far side of the formation when a pikeman vanished with a loud pop, his weapon dropping to the ground. I had no idea what happened to him until I heard a high-pitched wail. At first, I thought the sound somehow came from the dropped pike itself, but then I noticed a small red radish lying next to it.

The radish picked itself up on two little legs and ran off into the night, shrieking wordlessly all the while.

“It’s the screams that bother me the most,” a halberdier muttered. “Why do they always scream?”

“What was that?” I asked.

The captain’s expression was grim. “It’s a side effect of the grand vizier’s spell. It quickens our movement, but about one out of every twenty men gets turned into a radish.”

In an army of this size, that had to mean tens of thousands of people. “Is there any way to turn them back?”

“No one knows,” he answered curtly. None of the men seemed eager to discuss it any further.

The lifeless ash soon changed to lifeless dirt under our feet. The ground had been churned by the passage of soldiers until hardly a blade of grass was left. We’d reached the imperial army camp.

It sprawled across the landscape like a city-sized patch of fungus, everything in it turned a baleful red by the light of the wizards’ wands. A horde of screaming radishes rushed to and fro between the supply wagons and the latrines.

“Good luck,” Sunbeam whispered as a pair of orderlies grabbed hold of the horses’ reins and led them off to be stabled. Then, with apologies, the captain relieved me of my sword and left me in an open-topped wooden stockade with Ilyana. Under heavy guard. He promised to send our message up the chain of command as quickly as possible.

That turned out to be not very quick. We waited. And waited some more. I started some bamboo growing under the stockade walls, in case we needed to break out. If you want a plant that can tear a wooden wall apart and time is an issue, bamboo is by far your best bet. It grows fast and doesn’t like anything to get in its way.

“How long is it until midnight, do you think?” I asked Ilyana.