The southern gates opened, spilling light as well as the Council soldiers in their red tunics. The mounted soldiers came first, four abreast. They carried torches, as well as weapons, so that the flames flashed off the blades, and off the eyes of the horses.
Back in Simon’s tent at the encampment, when we’d planned the attack, it had seemed straightforward: arrows and crosses marked on a map. The best vantage point for our archers to plant themselves, to provide cover for the runners with grappling irons and ladders for the wall. The routes where our two mounted squadrons would flank the town and lay siege to the northern wall where the assassins had begun the fire. Four squadrons to charge at the eastern gate, where the sentry tower was flimsiest. On Simon’s map, everything had been neat and contained. As soon as the battle began, that neatness was lost in blows and blood. On the island, I had watched most of the battle from the window of a locked room in the fort; I thought I’d witnessed what fighting was. I realized, now, how wrong I had been, and what difference a few hundred yards could make. In the midst of the battle, now, I had no sense of strategy, or of the overall shape of the battle. I could see only what was happening immediately in front of me. My instructions were to stay close to Zoe and Piper as they led the attack on the eastern gate, but I quickly lost any sense of our destination. Everything was too fast, the whole world accelerating. The horses’ hoofs set the ground beneath us trembling. A mounted soldier thrust a blade downwards at Zoe, and she dived to the side. I ducked to avoid a sword that swung by my head as Piper exchanged blows with another soldier to my right. Zoe had regained her feet when I next looked, and when the rider blocked her strike, she slipped under his sword and severed the girth. Her blade nicked the horse’s belly too, and blood dropped to the snow as the saddle slid down the far side, taking the soldier with it, so that he fell almost on top of me. He scrambled up, but had dropped his sword in the fall. When he bent to retrieve it, I stamped my foot on the hilt, pressing it into the snow.
The fallen soldier looked up from where he crouched. Now I should kill him. I knew that, and my hands tightened on my sword hilt. But before I could raise my blade, Zoe had dodged around the flailing horse and sunk her blade into the man’s stomach. She had to shove the sword again to dislodge him. His blood left her blade blackened as he slid backward off it to the ground.
Next to me, Piper had fought free of his opponent, but another horse came straight at him. He stepped aside at the last moment, aiming a low slash at the horse’s legs. It was a terrible sight—one of the legs seemed to have gained an extra joint, a bend where none should be. The horse went down screaming, and the soldier jumped clear just in time to avoid being crushed as his mount rolled to its side, knocking me down as it went.
Piper and Zoe were fighting above me, each hand to hand with a Council soldier. Beside me, on the ground, the horse tried to right itself on its broken legs. Its nostrils flared, wide as overripe lilies. Its eyes had rolled so far back that all I could see was the white, marbled with red veins. When the horse screamed, the noise was somehow more human than half the sounds of the battle around me. One of its legs was pierced by its own bone, a spar of white thrust through the blood-matted hair.
I pulled my knife from my belt, reached up to the horse’s thrashing head, and slit its throat. The blood emptied itself onto my hand, surprising me with its heat. Its force, too. It didn’t run but spurted, spraying up my arm. The snow beneath it melted, the blood soaking into the iced earth. Then it was finished.
The horse died a single death. I felt it, the simplicity of it—no answering echo of death from a twin. For something so blood-soaked, it felt clean. I scrambled to my feet.
The first wave of Council riders had broken through the