The second of November brought the Thracian cold, the kind that didn't come sharp, but settled in and stayed. It seeped through wool and leather. Breath showed for a moment, then the wind took it.
By dusk the army halted on a wide plain. A ring of trees sat at the edge of sight, close enough that you could smell them: wet bark, leaf rot, the sourness of river ground.
The camp was laid out in lines. Lanes were kept clear. Fires were spaced and controlled. Companies settled into their assigned areas. The outer ring stayed loud with animals, wagons, and men trying to keep warm.
The center was different: tighter and quieter.
The lanes between tents were narrow, churned by wheels and boots into softening earth. Fires were fewer here, kept low. The command tent sat near the center. Behind it were powder barrels under tarps, wagons of shot, spare wheels, and iron tools. Beyond that, the cannons were lined up in a row.
In Constantine's tent, a lantern burned behind a horn panel, giving weak light. The canvas moved in the wind. Outside, a horse stamped twice. Nearby, a man coughed deep and wet.
Constantine and George sat by the lantern on low stools, still in their cloaks. Their hands were numb. They used a travel chest as a table. A small deck of cards lay between them, worn at the edges.
George dealt.
The cards were one of Constantine's habits. A game from a life that no longer had weight except when it came back in fragments like splinters. George had learned it quickly. Too quickly. He had always been good at seeing what men meant to do before they did it.
Constantine had lost to him so often in the first months that it became a running cruelty among the officers: the Basileus who could outthink a siege could still be humbled by a deck of paper.
George laid down a card—reverse—and the corner of his mouth lifted as if at a private joke.
"You still make this face," Constantine said quietly.
"What face?"
"The one you wear when you pretend this matters."
George's fingers paused over the next card. He looked up. The lantern made the hollows under his eyes deeper. For a moment Constantine saw not his confidant and diplomat, but the man who had once ridden beside him in the Morea with a short sword and a belief.
"It matters," George said, and slapped down a card. "Because if it doesn't, then we are sitting here like fools while a thousand men try not to imagine dying."
Constantine drew a card. He held it without playing it, as if the delay might buy something real.
Outside the tent, someone laughed, one sharp burst, instantly swallowed, like a spark in mud.
"You hear them?" George asked. "They talk about the cannons as if they are archangels. As if iron will intercede."
Constantine's gaze flicked, involuntarily, toward the row of guns beyond the canvas. He forced himself back to the table.
"Your move," he said.
George slapped a card down with two fingers. The sound was quiet but sharp in the hush. He didn't look up as he said, almost conversationally, "Colder today. But at least it's not raining."
Constantine's eyes stayed on the cards; he answered without looking up.
"God willing, it stays so," he murmured. "Cold is a burden a man can carry. If it rains—"
"—then we rot in place," George finished, and his thumb worried the edge of the card.
"And time," he added. "Once it turns cold, everything gets harder. Roads stiffen, horses go lame, men start coughing, and each day costs more."
Constantine's mouth twitched; his way of admitting it hit. He drew another card, hesitated, and set it down as if it might bite.
"So you still don't trust Fruzhin," Constantine said.
George's eyes didn't lift. "I trust him to want what he wants." A pause. "Which is always more than he says."
The brazier in the corner gave off more smell than heat—charcoal and singed fat. Constantine could taste it. He watched George's hands: steady and practiced. His knuckles were tight.
"He's hungry for a crown," George went on. "You can hear it in him. He chooses his words. He tells you what you want to hear and holds back the rest. When he smiles, he's watching the room, and where the danger is."
Constantine tapped the edge of the travel chest once. "He's useful for now, while his hunger points where we aim it," he said. "Later, it may turn. So we choose the moment, not him."
He let the words sit. Then, almost as an afterthought: "A small Bulgarian Orthodox despot could be useful as well."
George exhaled through his nose, in agreement, without ease.
Constantine tilted his head toward the cards. "You don't trust the card. You trust the hand and the rhythm."
George's gaze flicked up for the first time. Lantern light made his eyes look darker, older. "And the hand you can't see?"
Constantine didn't blink. "That's why we don't sleep like fools."
George's fingers hung a fraction over the next card. "Your Majesty," he said softly—then, in the tent's thin privacy, "I don't fear your plans. I fear what plans can't cover."
Constantine didn't deny it. He set his last card down.
The spread held for a heartbeat, silent, and then George's mouth moved, barely. "Fine," he said. "Take it."
Constantine let out one exhale. It carried a tired satisfaction that felt, even to him, faintly indecent. "At last," he murmured. "I beat you once. It's been a while."
George's mouth twitched again. "Hah. Enjoy it," he said.
They stacked the cards. Constantine gathered them with slow hands, squaring the deck as if order could be pressed into existence by pressure alone.
"You should rest, Majesty. You make worse bargains when you're tired."
"You're right, George, if the night allows it," Constantine said.
He lowered the lantern's shutter. The light dimmed.
The attack came the way akıncı attacks always came—light, fast, and pitiless.
From the treeline on the north edge of the plain, torches bobbed and multiplied. Hooves drummed on damp ground. Arrows hissed, and the first struck canvas with a wet, fistlike thud. A man screamed—high, shocked—then cut off.
A horn sounded from the right—one hard note, then two. A moment later another horn answered from farther out. Then arrows hit the tents and men started shouting.
Constantine was already swinging his legs off the bed when a runner ducked through the flap at a crouch, breath sawing in his throat.
"Majesty," he got out, and swallowed as if the word stuck. "Left picket's gone dark. No horn. No lantern answer."
He was on his feet before his cloak settled on his shoulders. He threw back the tent flap and cold air cut in—damp and sharp. Outside, lanterns bobbed and men shouted one another awake into discipline.
"Posts," Andreas' voice carried from somewhere to the west—low, iron. "Posts! By Christ, close the lanes!"
The camp reacted quickly. Wagons were moved into position. Pike-men formed across the lanes. The Pyrveloi were pulled back behind wagons and screens so they could fire safely.
A shout rose from the animal lines, high with panic. Then came hooves—too many, too close—hammering through the dark.
Raiders hit in two places at once. On the east edge, torchlight flared and ran. On the west, arrows and shouting and a brief clash of steel—noise meant to pull eyes and bodies from the center. The Ottomans didn't come to die in lines. They came like wolves: snap, bite, vanish—take a throat if luck opened it.
Constantine moved toward the junction where the main lanes met, close enough to see what was happening. Two guards stayed with him, one keeping a hand on his elbow.
"Hold your fire unless you have a shape," Constantine barked at a knot of men with muskets raised too early. "Waste powder on shadow and you'll die with empty hands."
Through a gap, akıncı riders were already slipping—light horse, dark scarves, torches muffled in cloth. They didn't ride like knights; they rode like thieves who'd learned to kill.
A tarp on a supply cart caught. The flame was small—then it found tallow and flared, eager, licking upward. A man smothered it with a wet blanket. The blanket smoked. He screamed as the heat bit through.
"Back," Constantine told himself. He still lunged toward the gap, dragged by instinct, and the guard at his elbow yanked him hard.
"Majesty—no."
Constantine's teeth met hard. His breath came in short, controlled pulls. He pointed, stabbing the air as if he could nail the night in place. "There. All weight there. Close it. Close it."
Then he saw Thomas, riding hard out of the eastern haze, a few dozen riders bunched behind him.
"Thomas!" Constantine roared.
Thomas didn't look. He drove his horse straight at the torn lane.
For an instant Constantine's mind split—an echo of another life, watching men do stupid, brave things where the stakes were only pride.
Thomas's helmet was half-strapped, his cloak gone. He was shouting, but hooves and smoke ate the words.
They hit like a door slammed in a face. Lances and spearshafts drove into the first riders; wood snapped, men shouted, horses screamed. An akıncı's torch spun out of his hand and skittered across the mud, hissing. Another tried to shoulder through anyway, horse pushing at the lane as if flesh could make room where wood and iron refused.
Thomas rammed his knee into his saddle and threw his weight forward, blade low, not elegant—just close and brutal. The akıncı recoiled. The line wavered. For a breath, the pressure at the gap eased.
An arrow took the man to Thomas's left in the throat. He folded without a sound, sliding from the saddle into the mud. A horse stepped on him with a wet crack and didn't even break stride.
Thomas didn't look; he hauled his reins hard, turned his horse sideways, and held the mouth of the lane with horseflesh and shouting while his men pressed in behind him. "Close it!" he roared over his shoulder. "Wagons—now!"
A cart lurched forward. Men seized the yoke and dragged it across, inch by inch, choking the gap down.
Then the arrow found Thomas.
It drove into shoulder and bone, seating hard. He jerked—surprise for a heartbeat—then his face set. He stayed in the saddle, teeth bared, holding the lane as the cart ground another span across and the opening narrowed to something that could finally be killed.
"Hold it!" Andreas roared somewhere close.
A Pyrvelos volley cracked from behind wagon wheels—measured shots, low, into shapes that were too close to be missed. Horses screamed and went down, tangling legs and tack, creating their own barricade of meat and panic.
The riders could still have tried. They didn't. The moment had passed. Their opening had become a kill box.
They began to peel away into the night, leaving torches dropped in mud, leaving men who would not get up.
"Don't chase!" Andreas' voice cut through, savage. "Hold! No pursuit!"
Only when the last torchlight vanished into the tree lines did Thomas finally sag.
He tried to straighten anyway. He shoved a pikeman aside as if insulted. "I'm—fine," he rasped, and the word broke on his teeth. His hand went toward the arrow shaft as if he meant to pull it out by will alone.
Andreas reached him first and grabbed his good arm.
Thomas's legs buckled. He refused to fall. He planted his boots in mud and tried to stand as if standing could undo pain.
Two men had to take him, one on each side, dragging him backward from the lane while Thomas cursed them, curses thick with spit and pride. His face was white under soot. The arrow shaft bobbed with every step like a grotesque metronome.
"Get him to the surgeons," Andreas snapped, and the men obeyed.
The fire near the supply carts was finally smothered.
The camp held.
George found Constantine near the command tent, a wax tablet tucked under his arm. In the lantern light, their breath showed. His face was composed the way it always was when he was afraid: not pale, not panicked, but tight.
For a moment, his hand trembled. Once. He caught it with his other hand and forced it steady, like a man pinning down his own weakness.
"The powder?" Constantine asked.
"Safe—God be praised," George said. The words came out flat, not victorious. "We held the wagon line." His eyes flicked toward the lane mouth and the bodies. "At a cost."
Constantine looked down where a man's cloak lay torn away, a discarded skin.
"How many?"
George swallowed. "Two hundred dead and counting, Majesty. Wounded… more. Some are already choking on their own blood."
Something cold moved through Constantine that wasn't the night air. Two hundred men—names that would become ink unless he forced himself to remember mouths, hunger, mothers.
"And the draft animals?"
George's stylus scratched. "Dozens dead. More lamed. Wagons broken. Harness cut." His voice tightened.
Constantine nodded once, because there was nothing else to give. Behind the wagons, a man screamed high, until the sound collapsed into a wet cough. Constantine left George to the numbers and moved toward the surgeons' tent, where the lanterns burned more brightly.
Thomas lay under a surgeon's lantern; the arrow had been snapped; the shaft still sat in him, waiting for hands steady enough to pull it without ruining what held his arm together. Sweat shone on his face. His jaw worked like it might crack a tooth.
When Constantine arrived, Thomas tried to rise.
"Don't."
Thomas did anyway. His good hand found the cot's edge. He got halfway up before the world tipped; two men caught him. He spat, furious at his own body.
"I'm not—finished," he rasped.
"You saved the powder," Constantine said. The words came out hard, because soft would make them false. "That is what you did. Now you stop."
Thomas tried to smile and failed. He sank back, breathing in short, ugly pulls.
The surgeon looked up. "Majesty—if you march at first light, I can't promise he keeps the arm. I can't promise he keeps his life. The road will do the rest."
A quartermaster shoved in behind Constantine, face grey with soot. "We can't march like this," he said, titles forgotten. "Harness cut. Wagons broken. We'll leave stores in the mud or break wheels by noon."
The lantern made the canvas walls glow like old bone. The surgeon waited. The quartermaster waited. Outside, a wounded man kept repeating a name, saint or wife, thin as thread.
Constantine listened until the name blurred into breath. Then he said, flat and final, "We hold here today. One day, no more."
The quartermaster started to speak. Constantine raised a hand and stopped him.
"We regroup," he said. "Mend the harness. Tighten the wagon line. Double the watches. No march at first light."
He looked at the surgeon. "Keep him alive. Do what you have to."
He turned back to the quartermaster. "At noon I want a list: what rolls, what gets stripped, what can be repaired by night. Until then, no one moves."