The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(81)
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.