“Who is that, master?” he asked when Sollis handed him a ribbon but it was clearly not a day for questions.
“Worry about the Test, boy!” Sollis cuffed him angrily on the side of the head. “Distraction will kill you this day.”
When they had all tied the ribbons to their arms they stood eyeing the defenders about a hundred yards away. Somehow they seemed to have grown in number.
“What do we do, Vaelin?” Dentos asked, looking at him expectantly.
Vaelin was about to shrug when he noticed they were all looking at him expectantly, not just the boys from his group, all of them. Nortah was the only exception, blithely tossing his wooden sword into the air and catching it again. He seemed bored. Vaelin struggled to formulate a plan; they were taught combat but not tactics. He had heard of flanking manoeuvres and frontal attacks but had no real idea how they worked. Most of the battle stories he knew concerned heroic brothers winning victory through individual effort and even then they were usually trying to storm a city wall or defend a bridge not capture a lance. The lance…What value is there in a lance?
“Vaelin?” Caenis prompted.
“This isn’t really a battle,” Vaelin said, thinking aloud.
“What?”
Battles are not over when a man gets his hands on a lance, they’re over when one army destroys the other. That’s why it’s called the Test of the Melee. They want to see us fight, that’s all. The lance means nothing.
“We’ll go straight into them,” he said, raising his voice, trying to sound both confident and decisive. “We’ll charge into the centre of their line, hard and fast. Break it open and the lance is ours.”
“Hardly a subtle stratagem, brother,” Nortah observed.
“Do you want to lead this?”
Nortah inclined his head, smiling. “I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m sure your plan is sound.”
“Form up,” Vaelin told them. “Keep it tight. Barkus you’re in front with me, and you Nortah. You two as well,” he picked out two of the beefier boys he knew to be more aggressive than most. “Caenis, Dentos stay close, keep them off when we go for the lance. The rest of you heard what the Aspect said. If you don’t want your coins in the morning get in there, pick an enemy and beat him to the ground, when you’ve done that find another.”
The cheer surprised him, a ragged yell punctuated with a small forest of upraised wooden swords. He joined in, waving his sword and yelling and feeling silly. Incredibly, they yelled even louder, some of them even began shouting his name.
He kept it going as they began to advance, walking at first. The hundred yards to the enemy seemed to shrink in a few heart beats.
“Vaelin! Vaelin!”
He took the pace up to a jog, hoping to save as much energy as possible for the fight.
“Vaelin! Vaelin!”
Some of the boys were almost screaming now, Caenis amongst them. The pace began to quicken as they covered more than half the distance to the enemy. Seemingly his small army was eager to get at their foes. Some of them breaking into a run.
“Steady!” Vaelin shouted. “Keep together!”
“Vaelin! Vaelin!” He glanced around seeing faces distorted with rage. Fear, he understood. They hide fear in rage. He didn’t feel enraged. In fact, his overriding concern was that he didn’t get another scar. He had only just had the stitches removed from his last one, a deep cut on his thigh earned from a nasty fall when riding.
“Vaelin! Vaelin!”
They were all running now, their formation starting to break up. Dentos, despite instructions, was out in front, yelling with manic fervour.
Oh for Faith’s sake! Vaelin broke into a sprint, pointing his sword at the centre of the enemy line. “Charge! CHARGE…”