The Winner's Kiss (33 page)

Sweet child.

Mine own.

Go.

Kestrel saw the clash from above. Through a spyglass, she watched Valorian war horses rear. Not the general's. He became motionless: a metal statue. His face was far away, his features a blur. Her stomach clenched.

And Arin?

Trees obscured her view. She couldn't find him. She couldn't see anything below the horses' shoulders.

Infantry against cavalry.

Kestrel, you fool.

She realized that she must have believed in Arin's god. Some unexamined part of her must resolutely trust the god
of
death's protection. Only that could explain why she had set Arin against the Valorian vanguard—and her father—with any hope of survival.

Dread worked its way up her throat.

In the initial crush, Arin lost sight of the general. An officer's horse nearly trampled Arin, who dodged the reared front hooves. He caught a blow from the Valorian's sword; its edge lodged harmlessly in the shoulder of Arin's hardened leather armor. As the man tugged it free, Arin snatched the reins from the man's hand and dragged the horse's head down, heard it scream. The Valorian struggled to keep his seat. Arin buried the point of his sword into the man's side above his hip, just below the low border of the metal cuirass. Arin pushed.

An inhuman sound. Blood channeled down the blade. Arin's hand was warm and wet.

The Valorian started to slide from his saddle. His foot caught in the stirrup. The greave of his leg armor raked the horse's side and the animal reared again, nearly dislocating Arin's arm from his shoulder. He released the reins. The Valorian thumped to the ground. The horse plunged, ran wild, dragging the soldier behind him.

Arin couldn't think. He knew, vaguely, that enemy archers weren't firing on his company, prob ably for fear of hitting the Valorian vanguard. He knew that his own soldiers were falling around him. The Valorians, instead of pulling forward to meet the attack, stood their ground and grew more compact, a wall of metal and horses.

Those
stallions. The gorgeous brawn of them. High and huge.

Arin shouted in Dacran, then in his own tongue:
With me.

He drew his dagger. A blade in each hand, he ducked into the narrow space between two Valorian war horses and sliced open their necks.

Kestrel clenched the spyglass. The Valorian officers didn't advance, didn't separate from the middle ranks, didn't expose the supply wagons.

A war horse stumbled. Then another.

Her father hacked his sword down. It rose up red. She saw him shout.

“Cut the ropes,” Kestrel told her gunners.
“Now.”

Arin wanted to cry out. He saw an eastern woman slip past the Valorian defenses, hamstring a war horse, and reach the general. Arin wanted to say
No
, he wanted to say
Mine
.

The general, steady on his steady horse, swung. He cut the woman's head from her neck. Blood jetted.

“Hold formation!” the man shouted.

The rest of the general's commands echoed in Arin's ears as he blocked the downswing of a horsed Valorian's blade.
Rearguard, close ranks.

Arin's sword arm ached.

Archers, eyes on the hills
.
Cannons, at the ready.

He dropped the dagger from his left hand, hooked his
free
fingers into the Valorian's leg armor at the upper thigh, and yanked.

Flankers, defend.

The Valorian toppled from his horse.

Sword into the fallen man's throat. A gurgling cry.

The general wasn't fooled. He'd guessed this was no little skirmish. He held his vanguard back and let Arin's company come in order to tighten ranks in defense against a larger attack.

A horse shifted. A path opened between Arin and the general.

Ah, yes,
murmured Arin's god.

Then a rough, tumbling crash roared over the sounds of war. Arin almost didn't know what it meant until a crack broke the air.

The trees groaned, tipped forward, and thudded down. Most lay where they fell, but a few slid down the hill toward the road. They gathered speed, slammed into boulders or the trunks of other trees. Some speared down: leafy tops first, stopped by nothing or shunted by an obstacle into a diagonal roll that spun them off the hill and onto the Valorian army's left flank. The trees crushed men and women, cut a swath into the middle ranks.

Noise rang through the hills. Each thump and scream split the air. It sounded worse to Kestrel as the echoes died. She didn't want to hear silence.

“Ready a volley,” she told the gunners. “Aim at the middle
ranks.
Target archers. Drop the flankers. Drop anyone near a cannon. Cut a hole around the supply wagons.”

The gunners' faces were unafraid. Their position was mostly secure, well out of range of Valorian arrows. Cannons might be a problem, but the army below was still fumbling to unhitch cannons from draft horses and unload ordnance from the wagons. Kestrel was about to disrupt that.

“Matches,” she said.

They were struck.

“Light.”

Short fuses burned.

“Aim.”

Gunfire perforated the air. Arin heard what he couldn't see: the song of metal sailing through space. Iron balls, each no bigger than a small stone, hailed down. They punched into metal. Rang on stone. Drove into flesh.

Guttural screams. Arin saw the general's face go gray. Horse carcasses lay between Arin and the general. The shuddering wave of a stallion trying and failing to stand. The pitiable arch and flop of the horse's neck. And Valorians, two rows of them, trying to hold the front lines, confused, frightened, their eyes not where they should be.

Arin pushed forward.

Another volley of gunfire.

Far away, beyond the Valorian army, came a new sound. Hooves rattled fast up the road. There was a shrieking clash. Roshar's company must have struck the rearguard.

The
general shouted something incoherent to Arin. The Valorian formation wobbled, seemed ready to dissolve.

Then a cannon boomed from the central ranks. A second cannon.

The world became too loud for Arin to understand anything he heard, too fast for him to understand more than what his body did, and did again.

Blood was in his mouth. His hands were slippery. His muscles were loose and alive.

A cannonball thudded into the hillside not far below the gunners. Kestrel felt the impact's tremor in the earth. It vibrated the soles of her boots. It trembled the thin, gummy twigs of sirrin trees.

“Again,” she told the gunners.

But despite the gunfire, despite an attack on three fronts, the Valorian army didn't collapse or panic. The rearguard countered Roshar's attack. The Valorian army, thousands strong, segmented into three: front, middle, and rear ranks. But Arin's company, from what Kestrel saw, couldn't drive through the vanguard to reach the center. The rearguard's defenses were better than she'd hoped. Roshar made little headway.

Even divided, the Valorians would overcome their attacks. The only way to cripple Kestrel's enemy for the long term was to destroy the supplies. But the guns, deadly though they were, weren't precise enough in their aim. They couldn't open a path for either Arin's or Roshar's company to reach the supply wagons.

Anxiety
clawed her belly. Roshar, she thought, would have the good sense to retreat if he must. She wasn't so sure about Arin. She thought that if she couldn't drag a victory out of this battle, he'd struggle against the vanguard until it overwhelmed him.

The solution is simple,
her father whispered inside her. Kestrel didn't know whether it was a memory or her imagination.
If you can do it
.

She looked at the sirrin trees. Their sap oozed.

She heard the plunk of an iron ball dropped into its chamber. The dry pour of black powder. As the gunners reloaded their guns, Kestrel shakily tucked her braid into her leather helmet. She could do nothing about the obvious Valorian style of her armor. She remembered how she'd been uncertain whether she wanted her father to see her. A shudder ran through her.

No. Not seen. Never. What ever happened, she didn't want to be recognized. She scooped a handful of forest earth and scrubbed it onto her face.

Kestrel became aware that the small sounds of reloading guns had stopped, giving way to the dull roar of the battle below. The gunners, crouched low like she was, regarded her.

She stood. “Which of you is truly brave?”

The Valorian vanguard changed tactics. They moved forward now, pressing Arin's company back.

A hand caught Arin's arm, pulled him from the path of a charging horse. He turned.

No
one.

Bodies and blood. And then . . . an eerie energy in his veins. A sharp zing that made his gut tighten and his guard go up right before a tiny Valorian dagger flew into his vision, spiking through the air, straight for his throat.

As the gunners fired, Kestrel sliced her dagger through the shreds of rope left tied to the stakes in the ground. She scavenged the forest floor for smooth, dry sticks of birch. Hands wrapped in broad leaves, she broke sappy twigs from the sirrin tree. Careful to keep her skin from contact with the flammable sap, she bunched the twigs together, holding them around a birch stick and one end of the rope. With a free hand, she wound the rope around the twigs and the birch stick. Then she held the makeshift torch beneath the dripping sirrin tree, letting drops of sap coat the rope and glue it down to the twigs.

“Exactly like that,” she told the four soldiers who'd agreed to join her. When they each had a torch and had taken a box of matches from the gunners, Kestrel said, “Don't hold the stick upright until you must. The sap will run. If it gets on your skin, you might burn, too.” She told the gunners to fire two more volleys and then stop.

She and the four soldiers began to run down the hill.

Arin dodged the small dagger. A Needle. He knew that weapon. Needles were a set of six little knives.

He caught the next one in his arm, flung up to block the
dagger
from his face. It bit into the exposed underside of his forearm where his armor buckled.

Then either his assailant had grown impatient with targeting from afar, or a new opponent had entered the game. As pain flared up Arin's arm, somebody's sword crashed into his and knocked his weapon to the ground.

Kestrel followed the scars made by the fallen trees in the forest. She skidded down the steep incline, the four soldiers following. A volley of gunfire shattered the air. A Valorian cannon boomed back. The cannonball crashed into the trees. They cracked. Broken branches hurtled through the air.

A chunk of flying wood nearly hit Kestrel. Startled, she lost her balance and stumbled, getting sap from her torch on her chest armor. But she shouted
Run
. They were nearly to the road.

The second volley hailed down. Kestrel stopped the four soldiers at the edge of the trees level with the road. Peering through the leaves, she saw that the guns had killed enough soldiers on this flank that gaps in the Valorian defenses here were wide. She spotted the wagon that must hold the black powder. A Valorian stepped out of it, lugging a cannonball in his arms. “Not that wagon,” she told the four. “I'll take the one next to it. The rest of you, each choose a different wagon. Ready?”

Kestrel's fingers trembled as she opened the matchbox.

A commander never shows fear,
her father said.

Her hand steadied. She lit a match.

They set their torches on fire.

Arin dodged the swing of the Valorian sword. He pulled the Needle free from his arm, felt pain spurt. Arin briefly eyed his attacker. A slender, quick form.

The Valorian lashed out again.

Just throw it and run,
Kestrel told herself.
Throw and run
.

She burst from the trees. Her boots hit stone paving.

A crossbow quarrel soared over her head. Another hit a Herrani soldier running alongside her. He sagged and dropped.

One of the four, a Dacran woman, snagged his torch from the ground and lobbed it at the nearest wagon. Its canvas cover flared into flame.

Kestrel kept running. She couldn't see what the woman did with the second torch, but heard a howl of pain, a shrieking eastern curse. Kestrel understood only one word of it:
fire
. The sirrin sap, Kestrel thought. Maybe it had run down the woman's arm. Maybe the Dacran was burning alive.

Kestrel forced herself to run faster. Valorian soldiers were scattered now, disordered, cut off from the general.

She heard another wagon crackle with fire. She ran erratically toward her target.
Never a straight line if you have to run,
her father said
. Other wise you're too easy to sight and shoot.

She got shot anyway. An arrow hit her chest.