“Thank you, but I’m an awkward hand at new horses. I’ll take my own,” Borsini said, his voice carefully neutral. His enormous ears wiggled, and he tugged at his enormous nose nervously. He suspected a trap and knew he’d avoided it, but he wanted Neph to think it was luck.
Neph blinked as if disappointed and then shrugged as if to cover and say it didn’t matter.
It didn’t. He’d tied that cantrip into the mane of every horse in the camp.
5
Kylar had never started a war.
Approaching the Lae’knaught camp required none of the stealth he’d used to approach the Ceurans. Invisible, he simply walked past the sentries in their black tabards emblazoned with a golden sun: the pure light of reason beating back the darkness of superstition. Kylar grinned. The Lae’knaught were going to love the Night Angel.
The camp was huge. It held an entire legion, five thousand soldiers, including a thousand of the famed Lae’knaught Lancers. As a purely ideological society, the Lae’knaught claimed they held no land. In practice, they’d occupied eastern Cenaria for eighteen years. Kylar suspected this legion had been sent here as a show of force to deter Khalidor from trying to push further east. Maybe they just happened to be here.
In truth, he didn’t care. The Lae’knaught were bullies. If there had been a shred of integrity in their claim of fighting black magic, they would have come to Cenaria’s defense when Khalidor invaded. Instead, they’d bided their time, burning local “wytches” and recruiting among the Cenarian refugees. They’d probably been hoping to come to the rescue after Cenaria’s power was obliterated and take even better lands for their pains.
Without provoking anyone, Cenaria had been invaded from the east by the Lae’knaught, from the north by Khalidor, and now from the south by Ceura. It was about time some of those hungry swords met each other.
A smoking black blade slid from Kylar’s left hand. He made it glow, wreathed in blue flames, but kept himself invisible. Two soldiers chatting instead of walking their patrol routes froze at the sight. The first one was a relative innocent. In the other’s eyes, Kylar could see that the man had accused a miller of witchcraft because he wanted the man’s wife.