Page 37 of Heart of Defiance

I’m not in this alone, not anymore.

“We have several people who’ve joined us who have gifts for building, don’t we?” I ask to confirm. The captains have been compiling a list of all the magic every new arrival can offer as they appear. “Who can move objects with their will?”

It’s a common gift to appeal to Creaden for, since that godlen presides over construction as well as leadership. Much easier to build walls and roofs if you can stand back and direct the materials with your mind.

Captain Amalia nods. “Not enough that they could enhance our weapons a significant amount.”

The corner of my mouth quirks upward. “Not our traditional weapons. It’ll be risky, but… I think we can arrange for our countryside to do a lot of the fighting for us.”

Chapter Fourteen

Signy

“Gods save us,” Bertha mutters where she’s crouched on the hilltop next to me. “Here they come.”

The mass of figures in their white-on-black uniforms has appeared on the horizon. They march forward across the landscape like a rigid flood—perfectly regimented, perfectly steady, but with a momentum that feels inevitable.

Unstoppable.

My lungs constrict. I have to force myself to drag in a deep breath of the warm air to try to loosen the tension.

The Darium army isn’t unstoppable. We’ve cut down soldiers like these more than once in the recent past.

But never anywhere near so many. Never when they were utterly bent on our destruction.

At my other side, Landric shifts his position with an air of restlessness he’s trying to suppress. “Don’t move until they’ve almost reached the crossroads. We’ve got a little time left.”

When they come up on the crossroads, they’ll have theoption of veering north and laying waste to the first village on this side of the border. It’s a quaint place without even a temple to call its own, only a cluster of houses and a couple of common buildings surrounded by farms.

When we warned them, a few of the inhabitants opted to join our cause. A few fled to camp out in the forest farther north. Others refused to leave their homes at all.

They’ll all lose those homes if the army heads that way. We’ve seen how thorough Dariu likes to be in dealing out revenge.

There won’t be a single building left standing.

So we have to make sure they come this way.

I scan the fields on either side of the road for any splotches of orange we missed. With a waft of relief, I find none.

Most of our “army” spent the better part of the past day ever-so-carefully plucking any lissweld blooms we could find and adding them to the thicker field that’s currently at our backs. We didn’t want the Darium soldiers stumbling on a patch early and realizing the danger the flowers pose.

It isn’t just our familiarity with our country that works to our advantage. The Darium forces are ignorant in all sorts of ways.

They don’t know that our numbers have doubled since the last time one of their representatives confronted our resistance. They don’t know how organized we’ve become under the guidance of our own military leaders.

Let them think we’re merely a scruffy band of resentful townspeople who can barely handle a knife, let alone a sword. They’re marching on us assuming there’s no way we can stand against them.

Their arrogance is our greatest advantage of all.

A large man on a massive stallion rides in the center of the army, several scarlet plumes jutting from his helm. Thatmust be High Commander Livius, the one we were warned about.

The man who’s given the ultimate orders to every Darium soldier in this half of the continent. The man who’s overseen our subjugation.

As Landric watches the army approach, he twists his fingers into the grass by his knees. He’s pulled a brown cap over his distinctive reddish hair so it doesn’t catch the sunlight, but a few ruddy tufts poke out along the nape of his neck.

I shouldn’t notice things like that. I shouldn’t want to talk to him—but I don’t really know what to make of him these days.

He smiled when I explained my plan and told me it was brilliant. He volunteered to be on the front lines of this mission before we even asked who’d take that risk.

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