Shadow's Son by Shirley Meier, S.M. Stirling and Karen Wehrstein ...

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Eyes burning, the Circle comes threshing with
longswords To cut through the rot, and so Arko will fall.
Alas, oh, alas, for the Empire, and Kurkas,
Whose death-knell has tolled after so many years
The world's heart will bleed as the City falls crashing
So loud our lamenting, so soulful our tears…
The bard struck the chord with one hand, and with the other pulled out a large handkerchief of a scarlet
color strikingly similar to Arkan warships' sail-cloth, to dab his cheek with a loud sniffle.
Pity the day when the Eagle of Arko
First cast its eye on Yeola-e's plains.
When the battle is finished twixt Eagle and Circle.
The world will count up the losses and gains.
Koru. Megan put her tankard down. No news had ever sobered her so quickly. Not only had they
made it to the border, they'd decided to cross: Yeolis, who had a custom, held for centuries, against
being the aggressor. This hot king with all his alliances and mercenaries was marching on Arko.
"Sheepshit," Shkai'ra was yelling, "Sh'ourchance!"
Megan calculated. They had maybe forty thousand, by Ivahn's last estimate, and the song's. The Arkans
claimed they could field arejin ofrejins , a million. But she remembered a night at a river-port, Sarngeld
speaking with some Aenir, a mercenary by his words. "There hasn't been a rejin of rejins for a good
hundred years. The story just sticks in people's heads. The Aans, Kurkas no less than his forebears, let
things go, so now there's maybe five hundred rejins, spread out all over."
Five hundred thousand. How many were locked up fighting the Srians, the Kurkanians, guarding the
northern border and patrolling the Mitvald, fighting the Lakans ontheir border, since King Astalaz of
Laka had broken his peace-treaty with Arko, to ally with Yeola-e? There had been no word from
Kurkania for a good two years, a good sign Arko was losing there.Say forty thousand against, at
most, one hundred thousand, she thought. A little better, but… Wait, I'm not counting those huge
losses in the winter. Say forty thousand against sixty. And the forty thousand might not even be
right anymore; Ivahn gave me that number a while back, and winning invading armies don't
shrink, but grow .
It was a chance. The eagle could be stung to death by the wasp, if the wasp flew quickly enough. If they
had good generalling,damn good generalling, which supposedly they did.
Joyful stamping shook the floor. The bard had been lucky to be the first here with this; people were
throwing him copper Claws. Everyone seemed nappy except the Arkans, who looked like their dearest
wish would be invisibility. One, a middle-aged fellow in Arkan issue armor that was obviously repainted,
ground his face into the table in a most un-Arkan way.
People pelted the bard with questions as well as money. "What happened in the last battle?"
"It was a rout, what else?"
"How many did the Arkans lose?"