*
They didn’t have an hour. They had barely half of that. And no warning, Touars’s hope being to reverse their advantage of position with surprise.
But Damen had seen Veretians ignore parley before, and was waiting for it; and Laurent was of course harder to surprise than most men realised.
The first sweep across the field was smooth and geometric, as it always was. Trumpets blared, and the first large-scale movements began: Touars, attempting to swing, was confronted by Laurent’s cavalry, riding straight for him. Damen called the order: hold, even and steady. Formation was all: their own lines must not disunite in the zeal of the escalating charge. Laurent’s men held their horses to a canter, hard-reined, though they tossed their heads and wanted to break to a gallop, the thunder of hooves in their ears and rising, their blood up, the charge catching like a spark that makes racing fire. Hold, hold.
The shock of collision was like the smashing of boulders in the landslide at Nesson. Damen felt the familiar battering shudder, the sudden shift in scale as the panorama of the charge was abruptly replaced by the slam of muscle against metal, of horse and man impacting at speed. Nothing could be heard over the crashing, the roars of men, both sides warping and threatening to rupture, regular lines and upright banners replaced by a heaving, struggling mass. Horses slipped, then regained their footing; others fell, slashed or speared through.
Don’t stop to fight the front line, Damen had said. He killed, his sword shearing, shield and horse a ram, pushing in, and further in, opening a space by force alone for the momentum of the men behind him. Beside him a man fell to a spear in the throat. To his left, an equine scream as Rochert’s horse went down.
In front of him, methodically, men fell, and fell, and fell.
He split his attention. He swept a sword cut aside with his shield, killed a helmed soldier, and all the while flung out his mind, waiting for the moment when Touars’s lines split open. The most difficult part of commanding from the front was this—staying alive in the moment, while tracking in his mind, critically, the whole fight. Yet it was exhilarating, like fighting with two bodies, at two scales.
He could feel Touars’s force beginning to give way, feel his lines buckling, the charge near to gaining ascendancy, so that living men must get out of the way or find death. They would find death. He was going to carve up Touars’s force and hand it to the man he was challenging.
He heard Touars’s men give the call to regroup—
Break the lines. Break them.
He set out his own call for Laurent’s men to reform around him. A commander, shouting, could expect to be heard by, at best, the men next to him, but the call was echoed in voices, then in horn blasts, and the men, who had practised this manoeuvre outside Nesson over and over, came to him in perfect formation, with the majority of their number intact.
Just in time for Touars’s still struggling force around them to be rocked sideways by the impact of a second Patran charge.
The first rupture, a sharp burst of chaos. He was aware of Laurent alongside him—he could not be unaware. He saw Laurent’s horse stagger, bleeding from a long cut on its shoulder, while the horse in front of it went down—saw Laurent close his thighs, change his seat, and take his horse over the thrashing obstacle, landing on the other side with his sword drawn, and clearing ground for himself with two exact slices, mount wheeling. This, it was impossible not to recall, was the man who had beaten Torveld to the mark on a dying horse.
And Laurent, it seemed, had been right about one thing. The men around him had fallen back a little. For before them, all gold armour and glinting starburst, was their Prince. In the towns, in the processionals, he had always impressed, as a figurehead. There was a reluctance, among the common soldiers, to strike a blow directly against him.
But only among the common soldiers. He knows that any decision that ends with me on the throne ends with his head on the block, Laurent had said of Guion. The moment the battle began to shift in their favour, killing Laurent became Guion’s imperative.
Damen saw Laurent’s banner topple first, a bad omen. It was the enemy captain Enguerran who engaged Laurent, and who, thought Damen, would learn the hard way that the Regent lied when it came to the fighting prowess of his nephew.
‘To the Prince!’ Damen called, feeling the fighting change in quality around Laurent. The men began to form up—too late. Enguerran was part of a knot of men that included Lord Touars himself. And with a clear line to Laurent, Touars had begun to charge. Damen drove his heels into his horse.