the vast field of knee-high grass and trampled paths. We had a clear view of the fight, and there were more on Chevalier Waleran du Ferrant and Physician Pièrre du Guay’s side than we had thought. A handful of soldiers protected them and blocked ours from getting near. Waleran sat atop a broad horse, his spear a golden needle against the bright blue sky. Already two of our soldiers lay unconscious in the dirt. The bitter tug of channeled noonday arts hung in the air.
Waleran wore alchemical armor, magic stored in the polished metal, so he could use it without wearing down. Behind him a good few paces stood Physician Pièrre du Guay, his red coat a stain on the horizon and the apprentices. Sébastien—orange coat replaced by the scarlet of a fully-fledged physician—looked as if he might be sick. Charles and I slunk as near as we dared.
“Sébastien might know I’m here,” Charles said as we crouched in the tall grass. “He knows my magic quite well.”
Thank the Lord for his narrow-mindedness.
“He doesn’t know mine.” My ears were full of heartbeats—rabbit-fast panicked ones and the slow, steady thump of unadulterated confidence that had to be Pièrre—and it took me longer than normal to find the hacks in the cacophony. “Which one first?”
“The one channeling for Sébastien,” Charles said. He didn’t question if I could do it, didn’t explain what we would need to do. “We make it appear as if he fainted, use the time as they check that to get the others out of the way, and it removes Sébastien from play for a little while.”
We were in the midst of a mess and yet his simple trust sustained me.
“Understood.”
I gathered magic and held it in my chest, waiting for Charles to channel his magic through me, and his shoulder leaned against mine. The magic slipped between us like a breath, low and soft, and for a moment, I feared Charles was holding back until a jolt shook through my arm, my chest, and into the magic I had gathered. I channeled all into the ground and got lost in the feet of the grass, more power than a person would channel alone coursing through me. I jumped from minuscule cell to minuscule cell, riding the lightning of the living things between us and the hacks. None of the power was lost like it would have been if I channeled through the air.
“Oh,” Charles breathed next to me. “That’s why you always channeled down.”
“I probably should have explained this,” I said.
“Explain after.” He shifted the magic, directing it up into the hack working for Sébastien. His body lit up in my magical sight, nerves constellations in a bloody sky, and Charles threw the hack’s response system off balance.
The hack’s heartbeat raced, the pressure of the blood in his veins dropped, and he plummeted to the ground. The art he had been channeling with Sébastien faded away.
I withdrew the magic we had channeled into the roots of the grass, so Sébastien wouldn’t sense it. Charles’s magic tested the other hacks.
“Wait,” he whispered, watching them kneel to pick up the one who had fainted. “Until they’re holding him up.”
If they were all touching, we could channel the magic through them and remove three from the field at once.
We needed all of the advantages we could get.
The soldiers fighting with us were no match for Waleran. Madeline burned with power, healing our soldiers as Waleran’s magic tore them down. She bled herself to replenish the blood a soldier had lost, channeling magic so it broke down her vein and built the veins up in them; the healing arts that Henry XII had twisted for his own means. She saved his life and urged her own body to replace the blood it had lost. The five soldiers who had sided with Waleran were dead. Pièrre and Sébastien hadn’t healed them at all.
“Now,” Charles said. “Do it now.”
I looked away from Madeline and channeled for Charles. The magic slipped between the hacks, settling in the little gaps between their nerves, and between the two of us, it took nearly nothing to nudge the hacks’ bodies toward sleep. They collapsed, tangled together and snoring. Sébastien whipped his head to us.
Charles shuddered, and I took the lead, channeling my own magic into Sébastien. From so far away, he should have been able to resist it, to alter his body alchemistry so that it countered what I did, but all he did was stare, wide-eyed, at