Ironhelm - Douglas Niles [18]
"Good luck. You'd best get to your men."
"And to you. Try to shoot straight this time, will you?" Hal said, flashing a quick grin.
Daggrande huffed indignantly, but the cavalryman had already slipped into the grove. In moments, he reached his charger, Storm. The roan mare danced eagerly, anxious for battle.
"The standard, Sergeant-Major." A squire stood beside the mount, bearing the lance with the proud pennant of the Blue Lancers. The long banner, portraying a golden pegasus on a sea-blue background, snapped readily in the growing breeze.
"Captain, now." Halloran smiled as he slipped smoothly into the saddle and took the long staff. The squire grinned enthusiastically.
The olive grove screened their position from the advancing enemy, but the rows of trees provided good visibility to the right and left. He could see, within a few hundred feet to his right, the black, yellow, and green pennants of the other companies. At the far end of the line, Alvarro glowered at him from the back of a prancing stallion, his mouth split into a grimace that displayed his crooked, uneven teeth.
A full hundred sleek horses pranced anxiously as an equal number of steel-tipped lances came to rest at their riders' sides. Some of the steeds were black, others were brown or roan or gray. They were all impatient to charge. Be patient, Hal thought. Your time will come.
Halloran tried to suppress a giddy exhilaration. Helms-tooth, the longsword given to him by Cordell personally, hung lightly at his side. By Helm, what a glorious commander the captain-general was! Halloran's heart nearly burst with pride at the honor that had been accorded him.
But Cordell was the glue that truly held the legion together. His skill as a commander, his eloquence as a speaker, his courage in battle, all served to unite his men and propel them toward great deeds.
Through the olive trees, Hailoran could see the pirates advancing as Cordell had predicted, still preceded by their twisting cyclones of fire. The horsemen had a splendid view of the developing battle.
The scrub brush withered beneath the fiery columns, many bushes bursting into flame as the cyclones passed. Hal still counted ten of the unnatural blazes, advancing in a long skirmish line ahead of the army.
Suddenly he saw a pale white flash, like a blast of moonlight potent enough to shine in the daylight. The cone-shaped whiteness exploded from a point ahead of the army, expanding to his left. In the same instant as the flash, three of the fiery columns hissed into vapors and disappeared.
Once again came the flash of light, from the same point but this time expanding to Hal's right, and four more of the cyclones vanished.
"Icetongue!" he murmured to himself, feeling relief mixed with a little horror. All the legion knew of Darien, the elf-mage. Aloof and distant toward all but Cordell, this made her affection toward the commander seem all that much more passionate to the men of the legion. And she was mysterious, always heavily robed during daylight, for her albino skin reputedly suffered acutely from the rays of the sun.
Yet her power! Of course she had her slender wand and its deadly blast of ice. But she also could call a searing wall of fire to burst from the ground, a lightning bolt to crackle into the midst of an enemy formation, or even a swarm of meteors to smash with crushing force to the ground. On more than one occasion, those powers had secured victory for the mercenaries during a heated, hard-contested battle.
He saw the black-robed figure of the wizard, standing alone ahead of the army, and then suddenly Darien vanished. Halloran guessed she teleported herself back to the safety of the legion's position.
The pirates continued to surge closer, not visibly demoralized by the damage to their fiery skirmishers. A pair of fire columns still swirled forward to Hal's left, and one lone blaze advanced off to the right. Then he heard the thunderous bark of a man's voice, carrying even over