Two hours before midnight, a Kresim priest prayed for the group’s success, and the men were allowed to say goodbye to their friends and comrades.
Constaire found Verundish among the crowd. He wore his full uniform and carried a musket in one hand, with his sword buckled to his belt.
“Where the pit do you think you’re going?” Verundish asked.
“There’s still time,” Constaire replied. “Say the word now, and I will lead the charge.”
“No.”
Constaire shook his head. “Please, Verie. Don’t do it.”
“I have to.”
“No,” Constaire said. “You don’t.” He held something up for her to see. It was the letter she’d received from her husband three days ago.
“Give me that,” she hissed, snatching for it. “You have no right to read my private letters.”
He pulled it away from her grasp. “I had to know why you would do this. I know you don’t love me back, Verie. I knew there had to be a reason for this suicide.”
She slapped him. She hadn’t meant to, but a moment later he clutched at his cheek and stared at her like a hurt puppy.
She rubbed her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“I deserved that.”
Yes, he did. “It will be all right,” she said. “I have to do this.”
“I’ll challenge your husband to a duel.”
“He’d slaughter you.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“He would. He’s a skilled swordsman. It would take someone like… like General Tamas to defeat him.”
Constaire fell silent, and Verundish felt compelled to step forward, pulling him into her arms. “Why the pit am I comforting you, idiot?” she asked, feeling his tears on the back of her hands. “I’m the one going to my death.”
“I’m the one who has to live without you.”
Verundish shook her head. “Go back to your tent.”
“No. I’ve volunteered to lead the second wave. If you succeed in taking the breach, I’ll be right behind you. We’ll fight our way through the fortress together.”
“Pit. You really are a fool.”
A whisper went through the ranks for the Hope’s End to prepare. Verundish pressed her lips to Constaire’s and then headed toward the front line without looking back.
General Tamas waited for them by the artillery that would herald their attack. Behind him stood four Privileged, their white gloves etched with crimson runes that caught the dim torchlight. They regarded the Hope’s End with skepticism.
When the Hope’s End had fallen into ranks, Tamas addressed them.
“There,” he said, pointing to the fortress a mile behind him, “is our enemy. They sit assured in their towers, drinking to another day of our failure and thanking their heathen god that we don’t have the stomach to set ladders to their walls.”
“That ends tonight. Tonight, we will open a breach. We will swarm their fortress and put their shah and their Privileged to the sword.”
The Privileged behind Tamas shifted uncomfortably at the mention of killing their Gurlish counterparts.
“The fall of Darjah will destroy Gurlish confidence, and we will be one step closer to ending this damned war. And then, my friends, we will all go home.” Tamas seemed weary suddenly, and far older than his forty years. He smiled. “I’m done with this damned dusty land. I’m ready to go home and bounce my boy on my knee, and then take my wife upstairs where I can bounce her on my knee.”
There was a chuckle among the group.
“End this siege, lads,” Tamas said. “Get in there and break them once and for all and every one of you, living or dead, will be a hero in the morning.”
A quiet cheer went up among the company, and Tamas raised his hands for silence. “I’d be there with you if the king allowed me. By Kresimir, I would.”
That might have been a lie from any other general, but Verundish knew it for truth.
Tamas continued, “Captain Verundish will take you in. Follow her like you’d follow me.” He stepped away then, and gestured to Verundish.
Verundish raised her saber above her head. “No lights. Not a word. We move in darkness up below the walls, and wait for the thunder. When the wall falls, charge.” She waited for the nods, then lowered her arm. “Let’s go.”
Verundish moved across the rugged terrain between the Adran camp and the fortress of Darjah.
Her path was guided only by a sliver of moonlight, and the stars above her that glittered like the campfires of an army stretched across the sky.
They had been camped there for months, exchanging artillery fire with the fortress and mounting two assaults and, but for those attacks, the land had been left untouched. Jackals hunted in the long desert grass where hares and foxes had made their homes to hide from Adran soldiers.
A desert owl hooted somewhere nearby.
She led her company across several small gullies and then into a ditch that went right up to the base of the fortress wall. She had been told the ditch was a runoff from the fortress wells, a place where the Gurlish bathhouses empties into the desert.
They hadn’t mentioned that it also carried away human waste.
One man stopped to retch loudly from the smell, causing the whole company to squat down in the squalor in fear of an alarm. Atop the wall, torches outlined the shape of Gurlish guardsmen. None of them called the alarm and in a low whisper, Verundish ordered her company forward.
They reached the base of the wall and settled down to wait. Verundish unbuttoned the front of her uniform to get comfortable. No one out here would write her up for lack of discipline.
She guessed they had about fifteen minutes until it started.
It wasn’t long until Verundish heard one of her men squirming up the line toward her. She squinted into the blackness of the night, trying to determine who it was.
“Sir,” he whispered, putting his face near hers. The scent of onions on his breath and the sound of his voice told her that it was Grenatio, a soldier who had been given the option of the Hope’s End or a firing squad after stealing from a local family.
“What?”
“Sir, when you said that we wait for the thunder…?”
“The artillery.”
“Oh.” There was a pause. “That makes sense.” Grenatio wasn’t the brightest, it seemed. “Sir?”
Verundish suppressed a sigh. “Yes?”
“I’m afraid.”
“That’s natural.”
“Will it go away?”
“It will.” When a Privileged scours your bones clean with sorcerous fire.
There were a few minutes of silence, and Verundish looked up at the top of the wall. Still no alarm. That was a good sign.
“When will it start, sir?”
“Soon.”
“How soon?”
Bloody pit… “Any minute. Get to your position.”
The soldier moved his way back down the line, making enough noise to wake Adran soldiers back in their camp.
And still there was no alarm.
Verundish looked up at the black stone of the fortress walls and wondered if they would really be able to create a breach. Those walls were ten feet thick, reinforced by Privileged sorcery hundreds of years old. The Adran cannon had been firing on them for months without making so much as a crack.
The Adran Privileged said they could break the walls tonight. What would happen if they did not fall?
She heard a low whistle and had turned to shush her men when the first cannonball slammed into the side of the fortress wall above them. The impact made her stumble and she caught herself with one hand against the side of the gully.
It had begun.
Cannonballs and artillery shells rocked the fortress and shook the ground, causing the walls of the gully in which the Hope’s End crouched to shiver and slide.