“At least I only have one arm to lose,” Adrik said glumly. For all his Grisha talent, he had to be the most depressing person Nikolai had ever encountered. He had sandy hair and a boyish freckled face, and he was the human equivalent of a head cold. Nikolai had no idea what Leoni saw in him. That woman was a delight and a hell of a Fabrikator too.
“Cheer up, Adrik,” Nikolai had called back from the cockpit. “We may all be dead soon, and then it will be up to your disembodied spirit to make gloomy prognostications.”
To avoid giving away their location, they’d set down on a makeshift airstrip two miles south of camp and ridden the rest of the way to join the Ravkan forces.
“How many?” asked Tolya as he approached and handed Nikolai a rifle, another slung over his enormous shoulders. They’d already had reports from their scouts, but Tolya still had hope. The same hope Nikolai had let himself entertain before his own eyes had been cruel enough to dash it.
“Too many,” he said. “I was hoping it was a trick of the light.” The ranks of Fjerdan war machines were far larger than their intelligence had suggested.
Tamar and Nadia greeted them silently, Nadia giving her brother a nod of acknowledgment. She and Adrik were both Squallers, both green-eyed and wiry. But Nadia was an optimist, and Adrik was a member of the doomsayers club—the one they didn’t allow at meetings because he brought the mood down.
Nikolai checked the sight on his repeating rifle. It was the right weapon for when they needed to engage, but the revolvers at his hips gave him more comfort.
Fjerda and Ravka had been at odds for hundreds of years, sometimes meeting in outright conflict, sometimes skirmishing when treaties were in place. But this was the war Fjerda meant to win. They knew Ravka was outnumbered and without reinforcements. They intended to tear through the northern border in surprise attacks at Nezkii and Ulensk. After swift victories, they would push south to the capital, where Nikolai’s meager army would be forced to retreat and make some kind of heroic stand.
Nikolai looked out over the field. The land north of Nezkii was little more than a shallow, muddy basin, a sad stretch of nothing stuck in a state between swamp and pasture, impossible to farm and bearing a strong odor of sulfur. It was known as the Pisspot, and it was not the stuff of which glorious battle songs were written. It offered little cover and miserable soil for his foot soldiers, who were already up to their ankles in the muck. But he doubted it would stop Fjerdan tanks.
Nikolai’s commanders had erected wooden platforms and towers to get a better view of the battlefield—all of it camouflaged behind the straggly scrub and low, twisted trees the Pisspot was known for.
The sun was barely visible in the east. From the north, Nikolai heard a sputtering sound like some great beast clearing its throat—Fjerda’s war machines firing their angry engines to life. Black smoke rose on the horizon, an orchard of columns, a promise of the invasion to come.
The tanks sounded like thunder rolling over the horizon, but they looked like monsters that had crawled out of the mud, their gray hides glinting dully, their giant treads eating up earth. It was a disheartening sight, but if not for Nina, their blessed termite eating at the heart of Fjerda’s government, Ravka never would have seen them coming at all.
Nina’s note had given them the two points on the border where their enemies planned to launch their surprise invasion. Ravka had barely had time to mobilize their forces and put up some kind of defense.
Nikolai could have chosen to meet the enemy in the field, banners up, troops in plain sight. A show of force. It would have been the honorable thing, the brave thing. But Nikolai figured his soldiers were more interested in surviving than looking noble before the Fjerdans shot them full of holes, and he felt the same.
“Do you think they know?” Tolya asked, peering through binoculars that looked like a child’s toy in his huge hands.
Tamar shook her head. “If they did, they’d be staying very, very still.”
Boom. The first explosion echoed over the basin, seeming to shake the mud they stood in.
A silent signal moved down the ranks: Hold your position.
Another explosion ruptured the air around them. Then another. Another.
But those weren’t the sounds of tank guns firing. They were mines.
The first Fjerdan tank burst into flames. The second capsized, rolling onto its side, its huge treads whirring helplessly. Boom. Another exploded in a plume of fire as its driver and crew tried to escape.
Fjerda had assumed their tanks would roll through the basin, that their attack would be quick and decisive, that Ravka would have no chance to mount any real opposition. They would occupy key northern cities and drive the front south as Nikolai’s troops scrambled to meet them in the field.