Another year had ground past in blood and fire. Deep into 1915 now, and the western front had calcified into a butcher's ledger that barely moved at all — when the lines shifted, it was by a few wretched metres bought with thousands of lives, trenches full of men who'd stopped being buried because there was no longer time or ground spare for it, mud thick enough to swallow a man entirely if he stopped moving in the wrong place, artillery that had turned the earth itself into something closer to the surface of a dead moon than a living landscape. Down south the Bulgarians were locked into a savage grind against the Greeks. Germano-Hungry had picked up an entirely new front in the Alps, the Italians having thrown their lot in with the Allies and opened a war in mountains nobody had wanted to fight in. The conflict had grown teeth in every direction at once, and none of those directions showed any sign of retracting.
I was in Ukraine now with what remained of my mage company. Lena Schmitt hadn't left my side since Warsaw, and if anything she'd grown bolder with every week that passed, the careful distance she'd kept as a new recruit eroding a little further each time we were alone. She'd stopped calling me Captain in private weeks ago. It was simply Hans now, said soft, said warm, her hand finding my arm and staying there a beat or two longer than handing over a report required. On the train east her thigh had pressed against mine for the entire journey, and she'd told me, quietly, that she'd follow me anywhere, even into hell itself, in a tone that made the sentiment feel less like loyalty and more like something else entirely. In the field tents after dark, her voice dropped into a register that had nothing to do with discussing tactics, however much that was the stated purpose, her breath warm near my ear as she leaned in close enough that the conversation stopped being about troop positions at all.
I told myself, more than once, that this was simply the heat of prolonged war doing what it does to people thrown together under enough pressure for long enough. I wasn't entirely sure I believed myself, and I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to.
---
We were scouting west of Kyiv, five of us gliding high on our constructs, wind dragging at our cloaks like flags nobody had asked us to fly. Below, Russian lines sprawled across snow-dusted fields in a long grey stain — three battalions at least, advancing under cover of their own crude armoured vehicles. I brought the crystal lens up and felt something tighten in my stomach.
"Three battalions," I said into the speaking tube. "And they've brought tanks of their own. Boxy iron sheds, by the look of them, belching smoke like something dying slowly. Ugly machines. They'll still do damage if we let them close."
"Form up," I ordered. "Tracking rounds. Tanks first, then break the infantry formation. Make it count."
---
Our rifles sang together. Enchanted rounds streaked down and curved through the cold air with that small unnatural correction I'd stopped finding remarkable months ago. The first Russian tank took three hits squarely in its engine housing and erupted in a fireball that sent armour plating spinning outward like enormous shrapnel. One of the crew was blown bodily through the forward hatch, his body turning end over end through the air before it came down in the snow as a broken, smoking shape, limbs charred black, bone showing pale at more than one joint where the heat had taken the skin away entirely.
Two more tanks shuddered and died where they stood, tracks blown apart in showers of sparks and torn steel. Their hatches flew open and crewmen spilled out into the snow, only to be hunted individually by our follow-up shots — rounds correcting through the air to track them across open ground, detonating against chests and backs in red bursts that opened men from the inside, limbs separated in the blast and thrown clear in wet, irregular pieces across snow that had been pristine white not ninety seconds earlier.
The Russian infantry formation came apart entirely after that. Hundreds died within what felt like seconds — men running in pure blind panic as our rounds bent through the air behind them, finding backs, finding skulls, detonating inside bodies that had nowhere to put that kind of force except outward. The screaming reached us even at altitude, a raw chorus of men clutching at their own spilling intestines or trying, with both hands, to hold the remaining half of a face together after a round had taken the rest of it. The snow turned red for hundreds of metres in every direction, the colour spreading and pooling in a way that made the whole field look, from up here, like something that had been deliberately painted rather than simply ruined.
---
Then the sky turned against us.
The Russians had learned, fast and brutally. All along their line, heavy machine guns tilted skyward and opened up in long sweeping arcs, thousands of rounds stitching the air into something close to a solid curtain of moving steel. It was the first true anti-air barrage I'd ever flown into, and it did not care that we were difficult targets. It simply put enough lead into the sky that difficulty stopped mattering.
One of my mages — a young man named Brandt, who I'd flown with since Brussels and who'd shown me, on the train east, a small carved chess piece his father had sent him — took a burst straight through the chest. I watched his construct flicker, aether bleeding from its wings in pale streaks like something haemorrhaging, and then watched him fall, screaming the entire distance, his body twisting in ways a falling body shouldn't be able to twist, until the frozen ground ended it in a spray of blood and bone fragment that I felt obligated to witness even though witnessing it changed nothing.
Another of my men took a round through the leg, blood misting bright red against the white sky as he fought to hold altitude, his construct sputtering and dipping in ways that told me he had perhaps another minute of control left in him if he was fortunate.
"Break! Retreat! Back to friendly lines, now!"
---
We wheeled hard and ran, our machines banking through a sky that had become almost entirely tracer fire. Lena held my left wing through the whole desperate retreat, her construct weaving through the lead storm with something that looked, horribly, like enjoyment.
"I've got you, Hans," she called over the wind, voice almost playful even as rounds cracked past close enough to feel. "I always will. No one touches you while I'm here."
I didn't answer. I was watching the sky for the next burst, and some smaller part of me was watching her, wondering when exactly devotion had started sounding less like loyalty and more like possession, and not finding an honest answer before we cleared the worst of the fire.
---
We landed hard at the forward railhead in occupied Poland, boots crunching frozen gravel outside a half-ruined manor house serving as field headquarters. The colonel was waiting over a map table still marked with old bloodstains and cigarette ash that nobody had bothered to clean.
"New orders, Muller. The Italians are pushing through the Alps. Germano-Hungry needs every mage company it can get. You're on the next train south."
I wiped sweat and gun-oil from my face, chest still working hard. "I lost two men today, sir. Good men. I'm down to eighteen effectives."
He didn't look up. "You'll get replacements in Germano-Hungry. Fresh academy graduates are waiting at the staging depot near Vienna. Move. Train leaves in twenty minutes."
---
We boarded within the hour, my remaining mages crammed into the cars behind, Lena settled beside me in the officers' carriage as always. The wheels turned, and the flat Ukrainian plains slowly gave way to rolling hills, then thick pine forest, then the first jagged outline of the Carpathians rising against a sky already losing its light.
Snow-capped peaks crowded both sides of the track now, the air sharpening with every kilometre, wind finding its way through the mountain passes with a sound that genuinely did resemble something grieving. Lena leaned against the window, her shoulder warm against mine, watching the white slopes slide past in the dying afternoon light. Her hand found mine on the seat between us, fingers tracing slow circles against my palm.
"Beautiful, isn't it." Her voice had gone low, almost a murmur. "All this cold, wild beauty, just for men to die fighting over." She squeezed my hand gently. "As long as I'm with you, Hans, I don't mind the mountains. The cold. The Italians waiting up there to die for them." Her breath was warm near my ear. "I'll follow you straight into those peaks if you ask me to. Anywhere. Always."
I looked out at the rising Alps and said nothing for a while, the train rattling south toward whatever waited for us there, and let myself feel, for just that one quiet stretch of track, both the comfort of her warmth beside me and the small cold thread of unease that came with it, the sense that I was being followed by something devoted enough that it might not particularly care, in the end, what following me actually cost.
The war had found a new place to bleed. We were riding straight into it.