The door opened, and Jan-Torres went to speak to his runner. “Good news,” he called from the door. “Morgan survived the surgery. He’s conscious but weak. It will take him some time to recover.”
Rhianne leapt to her feet. “Can he be brought here, to my rooms? I could care for him while his strength returns. It would give me something to do, and I wouldn’t be so lonely.”
Jan-Torres’s forehead wrinkled.
“Stop being jealous,” she scolded. “You’ve no right to be. And you know better than anyone that Morgan has never been my lover.”
He shifted uncomfortably. “I’ll make the arrangements.”
35
The much-awaited message from the sentries arrived two days later: the Kjallan fleet had been sighted in the Neruna Strait. Janto’s stomach knotted. Here was the moment of truth. Now he would find out whether the plans he’d set in motion would save his country or destroy it.
Signals flew wildly between the palace, the cliffs, and Kal’s fleet in the harbor, as the Mosari and Sardossians made their final preparations.
Janto had commandeered the suite of a high-ranking Kjallan official as his personal quarters. It was on the third floor, with a large marble balcony overlooking the city and the harbor. From the balcony, he watched the mastheads of the Kjallan vanguard as the ships glided closer. “Rosso,” he called to his door guard. “Fetch Emperor Lucien.”
He’d made arrangements for some of the high-ranking Kjallan prisoners to watch the fleet action from balconies and windows in the palace. Seeing it in person would have a bigger impact on them than hearing about it secondhand.
The young emperor arrived on his crutch and false leg, escorted by six guards. Janto beckoned him onto the balcony; the guards waited outside.
Lucien limped toward him. “Now we find out if you were bluffing about that reserve fleet.”
“What reserve fleet?” Janto smiled and held out a bottle of Opimian Valley red. “Wine, Your Imperial Majesty?”
Lucien stared at the bottle. “You stole that from the imperial wine cellars.”
Janto popped the cork. “I compliment you on its quality. My men have been enjoying it very much.”
Lucien gave him a sour look.
Janto poured the dark vintage into twin crystal glasses and handed one to Lucien. “Your ships are forming up.”
The first seven ships had maneuvered themselves into a line and were sailing into the harbor single file, skirting the western edge of the harbor, moving into a position that would allow them to engage Kal’s fleet.
“Wait,” said Lucien. “What happened to the shore batteries?”
Janto gazed at the sad heaps of crumbled stone. “We blew them up.”
“But why? You control them—they give you an advantage!”
“They were complicating things.”
Lucien’s eyes narrowed. “You’re up to something.”
Janto smiled.
As the first line of ships rounded the edge of the harbor, more ships entered, but in a haphazard fashion. They had seen that the batteries were destroyed, so the only threat to them was Kal’s fleet. The first seven ships would engage Kal’s fleet while the rest sailed in behind them and landed troops.
Kal’s fleet, waiting deep within the harbor, looked small and pathetic. Gods, Kal, I hope I haven’t signed your death writ. But Kal had positioned his ships well. He’d stationed them as close to the docks as possible, so that no enemy ships could slip around and attack him from the other side. It negated the Kjallans’ advantage of numbers. The Kjallans would have to fight Kal’s six ships with a roughly equal number of their own; there was no room to bring in more.
Lucien sipped his wine, holding his glass with one hand. With the other, he gripped the balcony railing, his knuckles whitening as the first of the seven ships reached Kal’s fleet.
The first broadsides went off almost simultaneously, producing great flashes of light followed by a terrible roar. Wood exploded. Sails shuddered, riddled with holes, and a Mosari mast came down. The Kjallan ships sailed along the line of Mosari ships, firing as they went, until they’d lined up one-on-one against Kal’s ships. The extra seventh ship tried, without much success, to place itself so it could rake the last Mosari ship’s stern.
“Hold them, Kal,” Janto muttered. His own knuckles grew white on the railing.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Kjallan ships swarmed into the harbor and began dispatching boats full of ground troops. Janto had stationed his own troops, some mounted and some on foot, around the edge of the harbor to engage the enemy soldiers who landed. But most of them were former slaves, some of whom had only just learned how to fire a pistol. Their numbers were small, and the area they were covering immense. They could hold the Kjallans for a little while, but they could not stop a large-scale landing.
Kal’s fleet was locked in a deadly melee with the Kjallans. Masts and spars tangled together; sails ripped and flew free. Cannons roared. From this distance, Janto could not tell who had the upper hand.
When does the battle start? asked Sashi from his shoulder. His whiskers quivered with excitement.
Janto’s eyebrows rose. It’s going on right this moment.
Oh. It’s far away. The ferret retreated, disappointed, into Janto’s shirt.
The first wave of boats hit the shore, where ground troops engaged them. Still more boats were on the way. His forces would soon be overwhelmed.
Lucien smiled. “Where is that reserve fleet of yours?”
Janto indicated the point of the harbor, where mountains blocked his view of the sea. The bows of two ships glided into view.
Lucien inhaled sharply, then blew out his breath in relief as it became apparent they were Kjallan ships flying Kjallan flags. He squinted at them. “Those aren’t enemies. Are they?”
Janto was silent. More ships appeared in their wake—Sardossian ships this time, but also flying Kjallan flags. The new arrivals looked for all the world like the Kjallan fleet returning from Rhaylet, with Sardossian prizes in tow. The ruse would not hold under close scrutiny—there were too many Sardossian ships compared to the number of Kjallan ones. But in the chaos of battle, it would take time for the Kjallan commanders to work that out, and that time would make all the difference.
Lucien turned to him with a pained expression. “It looks like our fleet from Rhaylet. But it’s not.”
“No. More wine?” asked Janto.
Lucien wordlessly offered his glass.
By the time the Kjallans realized the new arrivals were not reinforcements but enemies, they were trapped in the harbor. They could not use their advantage of numbers and double up on the new ships in open water, but had to fight them one-on-one from the harbor, where they had no room to maneuver.
“We still have you outnumbered,” said Lucien.
Janto clenched his fists. “Come on, Kel-Charan.”
There it was: the signal. It flew over the palace in exultation, its purples and greens picked up and repeated from one side of the harbor to the other. Orange flashes lit up the eastern and western cliffs. The ships in the middle of the harbor tried chaotically to return fire.
“What did you do?” cried Lucien. “You took the cannons out of the shore batteries and lined them up along the cliffs?”