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A thousand quotes from noted scholars leaped to her mind. Accounts of what it was like to be in war. She’d read hundreds; some so detailed, she’d been able to smell the blood in the air. Yet they all fled like shadows before sunlight as she reached the front of the coalition armies and looked out at the enemy.
Their numbers seemed endless. A fungus on the land ahead, black and white and red, weapons glistening in the sun.
Reports said there were about forty thousand singers here. That was a number she could comprehend, could analyze. But her eyes didn’t see forty thousand, they saw endless ranks. Numbers on a page became meaningless. She hadn’t come to fight forty thousand. She’d come to fight a tide.
On paper, this place was the Drunmu Basin in Emul. It was a vast ocean of shivering grass and towering pile-vines. In meetings, the Mink had insisted that a battle here favored the coalition side. If they let the enemy retreat to cities and forts, they could hunker down and make for tough shells to crack. Instead he’d pushed them to a place where they’d feel confident standing in a full battle, as they had a slight advantage in high ground and the sun to their backs. Here they would stand, and the Mink could leverage the coalition’s greater numbers and skill to victory.
So logically she understood that this was a battle that her forces wanted. In person, she felt overwhelmed by the distance to the enemy—distance she, with the others, would have to cross under a barrage of enemy arrows and spears. It was hard not to feel small, even in her Plate.
The horns sounded, ordering the advance, and she noted two Edgedancers keeping close to her—likely at her uncle’s request. Though she’d always imagined battles beginning with a grand charge, her force moved mechanically. Shields up, in formation, at a solid march that the veteran troops maintained as arrows started falling. Running would break the lines, not to mention leave the soldiers winded when they arrived.
She winced as the first arrows struck. They fell with an arrhythmic series of snaps, metal on wood, like hail. One bounced off her shoulder and another skimmed her helm. Fortunately, the arrows were soon interrupted as Azish light cavalry executed a raid on the enemy archers. She heard the hooves, saw the Windrunners soaring overhead, guarding the horsemen from the air. The enemy kept misjudging cavalry, which hadn’t been available in significant numbers thousands of years ago.
Through it all, the Alethi troops kept marching forward, shields up. It took an excruciatingly long time, but since Jasnah’s side was the aggressor, the enemy had no impetus to meet them. They maintained their position atop their shallow incline. She could see why the enemy would think it wise to stand here, as Jasnah’s forces had to make their assault up this hillside.
The enemy resolved into a block of figures in carapace and steel armor, holding large shields and sprouting with pikes several lines deep. These singers did not fight like the Parshendi on the Shattered Plains; these were drilled troops, and the Fused had adapted quickly to modern warfare. They had a slight myopia when it came to cavalry, true, but they knew far better how to most effectively employ their Surgebinders.
By the time Jasnah’s block of troops was in position, she felt exhausted from staying at a heightened level of alert during the march. She stopped with the others, grass retreating in a wave before her—as if it could sense the coming fight like it sensed a storm. She had ordered her Plate to intentionally dull its light, so it looked like that of an ordinary Shardbearer. The enemy would still single her out, but not recognize her as the queen. She would be safer this way.
The horns rang out. Jasnah started up the last part of the incline at not quite a run. It was too shallow to be called a hill, and if she’d been out on a walk, she wouldn’t have remarked much on the slope. But now she felt it with each step. Her Plate urged her to move, as did the Stormlight she breathed in, but if she ran too far ahead of her block of troops she could be surrounded. The enemy would have Fused and Regals hiding among their ranks, waiting to ambush her. Other than the Heavenly Ones, few Fused chose to meet Shardbearers in direct combat.
Jasnah summoned Ivory as a Blade, the weapon falling into her waiting gauntlets. Ready? she asked.
Yes.
She charged the last few feet to the pike block and swept with Ivory. Her job was to break their lines; a full Shardbearer could cause entire formations to crumble around her.
To their credit, this singer formation did not break. It buckled backward, pikes scraping her armor as she tried to get in close and attack, but it held. Her honor guard—along with those two Edgedancers—came in behind to keep her from being surrounded. Nearby, another block of five thousand soldiers hit the enemy. Grunts and crunches sounded in the air.
Holding her Blade in a two-handed grip, Jasnah swept back and forth, cutting free pike heads and trying to strike inward at the enemy. They moved with unexpected flexibility, singers dancing away, staying out of the range of her sword.
This is less effective, Ivory said to her. Our other powers are. Use them?
No. I want to know the real feeling of war, Jasnah thought. Or as close to it as I can allow myself, in Plate with Blade.
Ever the scholar, Ivory said with a long-suffering tone as Jasnah shouldered past some pikes—which were practically useless against her—and managed to ram her Blade into the chest of a singer. The singer’s eyes burned as she fell, and Jasnah ripped the sword around, causing others to curse and shy back.
It wasn’t only academics that drove her. If she was going to order soldiers into battle, she needed more than descriptions from books. She needed to feel what they felt. And yes, she could use her powers. Soulcasting had proven useful to her in fights before, but without Dalinar, she had limited Stormlight and wanted to conserve it.
She would escape to Shadesmar if things went poorly. She wasn’t foolish. Yet this knowledge nagged at her as she swept through the formation, keeping the enemy busy. She couldn’t ever truly feel what it was like to be an unfortunate spearman on the front lines.
She could hear them shouting as the two forces crashed together. The formations seemed so deliberate, and on the grand scale they were careful things. Positioned with a kind of terrible momentum that forced the men at the front to fight. So while the block remained firm, the front lines ground against one another, screaming like steel being bent.
That was a feeling Jasnah would never experience. The weight of a block of soldiers on each side crushing you between them—with no possible escape. Still, she wanted to know what she could. She swept around, forcing more singers back—but others began prodding her with pikes and spears, shoving her to the side, threatening to trip her.
She’d underestimated the effectiveness of those pikes; yes, they were useless for breaking her armor, but they could maneuver her like a chull being prodded with poles. She stumbled and felt her first true spike of fear.
Control it. Instead of trying to right herself, she turned her shoulder toward the enemy, turning her off-balance stumble into a rush, crashing out of the enemy ranks near her soldiers. She hadn’t killed many of the enemy, but she didn’t need to. Their ranks rippled and bowed from her efforts, and her soldiers exploited this. On either side of her, they matched pikes and spears with the enemy—the front row of her soldiers rotating to the back line of the block every ten minutes under the careful orders of the rank commander.
Engulfed by the sounds of war, Jasnah turned toward the enemy, and her honor guard formed up behind her. Then—sweat trickling down her brow—she charged in again. This time when the enemy parted around her, they revealed a hulking creature hidden in their ranks. A Fused with carapace that grew into large axelike protrusions around his hands: one of the Magnified Ones. Fused with the Surge of Progression, which let them grow carapace with extreme precision and speed.
