CHAPTER 33: THE FIRST BATTLE PART II

Back on Ferrondel’s line, the front file had finished its third cycle.

The first barrels glowed faintly, heat shimmering off the bores.

Coils thrummed, hungry.

The battery men did not wait for orders, cells out, cells in. No one fumbled. No one spoke over command.

"Advance to the 250," Jeren said, spyglass still at his eye. "By bounds. Keep the cycle."

The ranks stepped forward in measured halves: front rank advancing past the rear, setting knee; rear stepping up to their old line.

It was not pretty in a parade sense. It was simple and it worked.

The ignited air smelled of hot gildbrass and the ozone-tang of spent Ignarion flame discharged from the shells; beneath it, the iron stink rising off the plain like a breath from a forge floor.

Ignarion’s shield wall attempted one last push, levies at the center, officers behind, swords flat against spines to force them on.

The flechettes went through four layers of metal and two men at once when the angle was true.

Those that survived the first step collapsed on the second as rounds meant for others found ribs below their shoulderline.

"Fix," Jeren said quietly, and the front rank lowered to their belts and drove the Architect-etched blades home on the lugs. "If they touch us, they die by steel."

They did not touch them. The third volley broke what nerve was left.

The horse wheeled away in clumps; the shield wall fissured, shouted something desperate that had the word "retreat" buried in it, and the spellswords backpedaled behind their own men.

A peerless Ignarion habit, saving bloodline first, the rest be damned, reasserted itself so naturally no one thought to be ashamed.

"To Death!" Caedrion shouted.

He drew the cavalry revolver with the Elder Dragonhorn grips and fired once into the sky.

The shot hit the barrier overhead and unmade itself; the sound rolled over the plain like a laugh.

From the low ground to Ignarion’s left and right, dust plumes answered as Ferrondel cavalry, split in two wings at dawn and held leashed out of sight, kicked into the open.

They were not a wall of lances.

They were knives on a throat.

One wing cut for the enemy’s left, angling to take the road to the river ford and seal the line of flight.

The other wing drove wide to the right and then curled inward, sabers low, knees tight, mounts kept to a killing canter instead of a panicked gallop.

Every rider wore the same enchanted half-plate as the infantry, every saddle rigged with a short rack of spare shells and a scabbard for a carbine-variant.

A shorter barrel, same .410 discarding shells. Revolver holsters flashed like teeth.

"Infantry, oblique left two files and press," Jeren called. "Do not break the cycle. Do not chase. Kill what runs past you and let the horse do the rest."

The first contact was not glorious. It was butchery. At the ford, Ignarion men jammed up in the reeds, shields turned backward to face the oncoming sabers.

Ferrondel riders fired at ten paces, dropped empty revolvers into lanyards, and took hands off reins to cut.

Horses shouldered men into the muddy water.

A spellsword tried to draw a line of fire through his own fleeing levies and saw the Architect’s engraving streak toward his face like a falling star; he died without finishing the sign for "ignite."

On the right, one of Caedrion’s lieutenants, Kareth, hard-faced and quiet, took his wing tight against a low stone wall and then over, dropping into Ignarion’s supply lane in a run.

They hit the wagon train from the side as it attempted to turn, and for a small, perfect moment Kareth saw the war’s future: not banners at clash, but choke-points and logistics, fuel and water.

He flicked his saber clean and pointed at the soulglass carts.

"Those," he shouted over the crush. "Break those first."

The second rank of riders shouldered in and did as told. When the soulglass cracked, the prisoners of the vessels got out in a single, shivering sigh no human heard.

Back at the line, Ferrondel rifles spoke on a slow heartbeat now—one file firing while two moved, two firing while one pulled the next tins open.

The extractors sang. The battery keepers handed fresh cells like bakers handing loaves.

A hundred paces off, Valerius finally moved. He did not command; he ran.

He ran with his jaw clenched and his eyes so wide the whites shone like coins, and two of his cousins seized his arms and dragged him still faster.

Behind him, someone screamed "the Ember Court will not forgive this" and then went quiet under hooves.

"Do we press?" Jeren asked, voice level.

Caedrion lowered his spyglass, looked once at the broken camp, and once at the map burned onto the inside of his skull.

The point was not to paint the plain with more bodies. The point was to prove the thesis, deliver the antithesis, and walk off the field holding the synthesis in his hands.

"Press the ring. Do not overextend. Kill their tail, not their teeth," he said. "We didn’t come to die on a banner. We came to end one."

So Ferrondel did not chase to the horizon. They tightened the loop, took prisoners who could be taken without risk, and shot those who could not.

By the time the sun pulled free of the cloud and laid the field bare, the Ignarion advance no longer existed in any useful sense.

Twenty thousand had left their camp; a quarter lay in the churned grass; the rest streamed for the south road in knots, their banners dipped, their kitchens burning behind them.

On the walls of Dawnhaven, the citizens at last understood what they were seeing, and the flowers they had thrown for mourning became flowers for victory, cast down not in despair but in a frenzy that made the streets look like spring.

In House Marvik’s hall, no one spoke. Lady Caltrisse sank back to her chair and pressed a hand against her throat as if forcing the breath back in.

Lord Seravant stared at the scrying sphere as if it had personally betrayed him. The Viscount’s spilled wine traced a red river down his shin and onto the carpet.

"Two months," Lady Marvik said at last, each word like glass. "Two months of Ignarion’s siege, and the first time the wall moves... is outward."

"Pull the feeds from their supply roads," Seravant muttered, voice distant. "If they can arm men like that in cities we can’t starve, then..."

"Then the age is over," Caltrisse whispered, and the healer’s truth in her tone made the others flinch more than the battle had.

---

On the ridge, Valerius looked back once. Dawnhaven was not a city to him in that moment; it was a sleeping god that had opened one rustlit eye.

Caedrion holstered the revolver, lifted his hand, and the volleys finally ceased. Smoke drifted.

Crows had not yet come. The men reset their sights to safe and checked each other’s buckles, each other’s throats, the small things that made them a line and not a mob.

"Report," Caedrion said.

"Coils within tolerance," Jeren answered. "Losses... light. Ammunition half expended. Battery reserve: green."

"Good," Caedrion said. He did not smile. "Then we will do it again tomorrow if they ask."

He turned his mount toward the broken Ignarion camp. The rustlight of the barrier washed faintly across his armor and made the Architect’s lines burn along his gauntlets like veins full of dawn.

No speech. No flourish. Just the new arithmetic of power, written in steel and flame, for anyone with eyes to read.