he sky didn't warn them. It simply started killing.
Kael heard it before he understood it — a sound like cloth tearing, brief and soft, and then the man three steps to his left sat down in the grass without being asked. He didn't fall dramatically. He just sat, the way a tired person sits, except his eyes were already somewhere else, and the arrow was in his throat, and the grass around him was turning dark.
For one full second the entire eastern line was still.
Then the second volley came.
It came from the tree line along the northern ridge, which Orren had noted the previous evening as a probable approach risk and which the command had apparently noted as nothing at all. The arrows didn't arc — they came flat and fast, the kind of flat that means someone on the other end knows exactly what range they're working with. They had been watched. The distance had been measured. Someone on the other side had done their preparation.
Kael dropped before he chose to drop, his body making the decision ahead of his mind. He hit the ground and pulled Bren down with him, and he heard Sorin shout something to his right and heard Ysse answer, and then the order came from somewhere behind them — advance, advance — which was the most insane thing he had ever heard in his life and also, apparently, the plan.
They advanced.
You do it because stopping feels worse, because the body in motion has somewhere to be and the body standing still is just a target with a name. Kael moved low and fast through the grass, spear angled forward, and the arrows kept coming and the line kept thinning and the sky above them was completely indifferent to all of it — pale morning blue, a few thin clouds, entirely uninvolved.
The first man to die near Kael was the one who had sat down in the grass. By the time they passed him he was already behind them, already becoming the past tense, already part of the new geography of this valley that was being written in real time.
He hadn't known the man's name.
He added that to his list of things that were wrong about this.
He kept moving.