said. “I mean, if we win. These problems can be handled. We don’t know what will happen after we win. If we can take Gavin’s army relatively intact and get the Chromeria to capitulate quickly, we could counter—”
“Do you see the White capitulating quickly?”
Corvan opened his mouth. Closed it. “No.”
“It’s not a good plan,” Dazen said. “I know that. But it may be the least bad.”
“We may still lose, I suppose,” Corvan said.
“You always do look on the bright side,” Dazen had said.
Now Corvan pushed Gavin back, wiping his own tears away with the backs of his hands. “I’ve missed you, friend.”
“And I you. Now, what the hell are you doing here?” Gavin asked.
The joy at their reunion leached from Corvan’s face. “I came to warn the governor that King Garadul’s marching here. His army will arrive within five days, a week at most. And they captured Karris White Oak.”
Gavin sucked in a breath. Karris captured?
There was nothing to be done about it now, even if it did tear a hole in his stomach and hollow him out. “I knew about King Garadul,” he said. “Not… the other.”
“I figured. Why else would you be here?” Corvan said.
“You think he’ll attack just after Midsummer’s?” Gavin asked.
“The day after,” Corvan said. “Ruthgari will have withdrawn, but the Parian regiments won’t have landed.”
It was what Gavin had guessed. It gave him almost no time. “I can’t believe that Governor Crassos never got word of Garadul’s army.”
“Don’t believe it. He did know,” Corvan said. “The Ruthgari have been withdrawing early. It’s a skeleton crew now, so they make sure they all get out of the city before Garadul attacks. Why should they fight to save the city for the Parians?”
“Bastards,” Gavin grunted.
“And cowards and opportunists.” Corvan shrugged. “What do you intend to do about it?”
“I intend to hold this city.”
“And how do you hope to do that?” Corvan asked.
“Put someone in charge who’s an experienced hand at lost causes,” Gavin said.
A pause, then Corvan raised his hands. “Oh, no. You can’t. It’s impossible. Lord Prism, I’m the enemy general!”
“And since when don’t the conquered sometimes join the victor’s army?” Gavin asked.
“Not as generals. Not right away.”
“It’s been sixteen years. You’re a special case,” Gavin said. “Corvan Danavis, held in high esteem by both sides of the False Prism’s War. The man who ended the war honorably. A man of unimpeachable integrity and intelligence. It has been a long time, why could people not believe that we had put it all behind us?”
“Because I’m the one who put that scar on your temple, and you were none too happy about it. And Gavin’s men killed my wife.”
Gavin’s brow wrinkled. “There is that.”
“You don’t need me,” Corvan said. “You’re no slouch at command, Lord Prism.”
It was true. Gavin had seen good leadership and practiced it enough to know his own abilities. He also knew his weaknesses. “With equal armies and terrain and me without magic, who would win between us, Corvan?”
Corvan shrugged. “If you had a good cadre of support staff, and your field commanders would tell you the truth, I think—”
“Corvan, I’m the Prism. Men don’t tell me the truth. I ask them, can you do this? And they say yes, no matter what. They want to think the righteousness of obeying the Prism himself will magically help them overcome any obstacle. When I ask for objections to my most flawed plans, I get silence. It took months and several disasters to get our armies even halfway past that back in the war. We don’t have that time now.” It took a certain kind of mind to understand exactly how each branch of his forces would react, what kind of combat situations they could handle and what ones they would buckle under. Gavin was good at that. He was good at judging enemy commanders, especially those he’d met, and figuring out what they might do.
But making snap judgments about the disposition of enemy forces from fragmentary scouts’ reports and getting thousands of men in various branches into position was something else entirely. Splitting your forces and getting them to take different paths to an objective, each under its own commander, and having them arrive simultaneously—that was a skill very few men had. Instilling discipline in men to continue maneuvering during the battle itself, for men to disengage right now when they could kill their opponent with just one more thrust, and to get men to communicate so lines could open just a second before a