The streets were filled with carts as families ran in and out of their homes to pile stuff inside. The severity of what was happening on the pathway had made its way back into the city, and people were choosing not to stay. Lines had formed outside the smithies, with a steady stream of armed militia leaving. Iron gates were being swung partially shut, and windows were boarded by those choosing to remain.

Mounted knights kept the peace and directed people to evacuate, stopping mages to ask why they were not reporting to their captains.

I slowed to a trot, weaving through the mess in a hurry. As one of the only mounted while not in uniform, a few of the knights tried to wave me down. I rode past and shouted behind that I was getting supplies for Captain Tometh. The name was enough for them not to pursue me.

I jumped off my mare and burst into the inn, running down to the cellar to retrieve the first barrel. I hefted it up the stairs to the lobby and caught my breath before grabbing the one in the kitchen. There wasn’t a chance I could carry all three while riding, so I got a bedsheet and placed them inside before typing it into a sack.

The silver wire was needed to detonate the dragon’s breath safely. I stripped the wax off the ends of the three wires, twisted the thin silver strands around each other to create one longer wire, bundled it up, and slung it over my shoulder.

With a quiver at my waist, the bow slung over one shoulder, and now wires on the other, I worried I couldn’t also carry the sack. I crouched beside it and brought the tied end over my shoulder, grumbling as I heaved it onto my back, almost falling over from the weight.

I bashed open the doors to the inn and waddled out into the street. “Hey!”

A young man was clicking his tongue at my mare, trying to get her to cooperate. His eyes were wide with fright, and he glanced back to a woman holding a small child who had his same blue eyes.

He settled slightly after getting a look at me, puffing out his chest and stepping between me and my mare. “I-I need this horse to help save my family.”

“And I need it to get supplies to the battle.”

“P-please, there's no others. We have to leave,” he said, gesturing to the mother, bouncing the child on the verge of tears. “I have a partner and son. He’s only two. Surely you can use one of the order’s carts for transport?”

I gritted my teeth while I brushed past him to my mare. “No.”

“You’re no knight. You’re not even Militia,” he said, emboldened. “If you give us the horse, I-I won't report you for looting.”

“Look, you’re fine here for now. I don’t have time for this. I’m working under Captain—Ah”

Cold steel slipped into the side of my stomach. The man left the dagger there and stepped away with shaking hands. “You—you’re a criminal. I’m sorry, but my family is more important.”

I resisted the urge to drop the sack over my shoulder and blow the entire neighbourhood. My breath came out in wheezes as I struggled to keep still and avoid agitating the knife.

Something was horribly wrong with my mind because all I could think about was how the ice-cold steel was slowly warming.

The man gave me a wide berth as he circled back towards the horse. “I-I’m sorry.”

“Come, get on. We have time to find a saddle,” he said to his partner, who was covering their son’s eyes. “I had to. I had to. She’s a thief. She would have been executed for it.”

While balancing my burden, I slowly reached down to grip the dagger's hilt and pulled it out. I looked down at the blood-soaked blade, glad it wasn’t serrated. “Kick him.”

My mare reared back as the man tried to encourage his horrified partner closer to the murder she thought he had just committed. He looked back in time to catch the pair of horseshoes on his shoulder instead of the back of his head. After tumbling head of heels, he lay sprawled out on the cobblestone with the wind knocked out of him, clutching his shoulder.

I flung the knife back at him, not caring if the pointy end struck. My mare knelt down for me to clumsily get on her back, my head feeling light. I pressed my gauntlet to the wound, precariously hanging onto the sack with the other. Blood slipped through the shiny steel fingers to stain my already shabby clothes.

I didn’t remember the spell given to me for non-targeted healing and hoped I didn’t need it before the wound scabbed over, preferably before all my blood ended up on the outside. I resisted the urge to trample the moron, feeling guilty because the kid had started wailing.

The ride back was slower, and I got stuck behind an entire unit bearing spears and shields as it marched towards the front. I whistled and shouted with what I imagined was authority for them to make way.

They still looked to their leader before creating a gap for me to pass through, but I counted that as a win.

The battleground had been created to contain the fewest forces possible to combat the ghouls' significant numerical advantage. So, the street before the gate outside was packed with everyone either doing auxiliary jobs or listening to the battle being waged ahead. The healing station took up a large stretch of the street, with Naimeen seemingly leading the efforts to close gashes and stem the bleeding.

I rode past, calling for a path at seemingly every step of the way. I flinched as spells were composed and launched nearby, fearing I’d brought destruction into the midst of us. The barrels held, and I rode through the archery line, past the watchtowers and trebuchets, to the back of the shield wall.

They’d been pushed back a dozen paces, and from the pile of ghoul corpses the oncoming hoard stood upon, it hadn’t been freely given. There were at least three rows of shields and double the number of spears behind them. The mages mixed within threw out spells at every opportunity, directly in the faces of their adversary.

An increasingly loud scream quickly approached, confusing me for a moment. Heads turned to watch the source: a woman with ghouls still clutching her, falling from the marble wall, shrieking until she thudded to the ground. The light from the mages still up there moved along the wall, away from the gatehouse, a number of them snuffing out.

So many mage lights were floating around that I’d hardly noticed the rising sun. I tore my eyes away from the spot within the hoard she’d landed and found the captain pointing Nickolas where to shoot next.

“Tometh!”

He turned from his position at the rear, his voice hoarse with repeated commands and stomped back to me after handing over to another captain. I dropped from the mare’s back and stumbled from the weight and wound in my side. Before the captain could start the angry tirade his knitted eyebrows suggested, I sliced open the bedsheets with an arrowhead.

There was a hint of fear in his eyes as he watched a spell fly past. It turned contemplative, and he called over one of the dedicated spell casters standing behind the spear users. “How far could you launch these?”

I shook my head and shouted over the noise. “That’s a waste. We bury it, withdraw, and blow a canyon between us and the ghouls.”

“No. We don’t give space for nothing.”

“Better to give some and make keeping the rest easier.”

“Do you still need me here, sir?” the mage asked, keeping his gaze on the ghouls.

“Yes.” “No.”

He didn’t listen to my request to leave, but the captain still glared at me. “Don’t give my men orders.”

I ignored him. “So?”

He looked back to the fray, taking far too long to think it over. “We need time to reorganise and swap out the front line. What do you need to make it happen?”

“Time and space.”

He nodded and noticed the blood dripping down the fingers of my gauntlet. My mare’s brown coat also had a red patch trailing down her side. “Is she hurt?”

“She’s fine. The blood is mine.”

The captain dared to look relieved and pulled aside my coat to see the red splotch. “Easier to heal a human than a horse. What happened?”

“Someone tried to steal my mare outside the inn.”

“Go see the healers,” he said, not surprised by the news and turned to the mage. “Walk him through how it works.”

I shook my head. “I don’t trust anyone, especially a mage, to handle this stuff. I’ll manage.”

The female captain, who had taken over his command of the front, called for him urgently as a pack of ghouls tried to flank them through the trenches. Petrick and Dyana were moving to cut them off before they got behind us, but they needed help.

“Do what she tells you when she tells you,” Tometh said, returning to the fray.

“Well then…Orders, Ma’am?”

“Know a spell that can dig?” I asked. His raised eyebrow and look of annoyance were answer enough.

“Dig a hole wide enough for these barrels on each side of the path and one in the centre.”

“How deep?”

“As far down as you can go.”

He quickly hit the first patch of dirt with his spell, opening a hole and making the surrounding dirt more compact with what was displaced. I pressed a hand back to my wound and started making a channel away from where the centre hole would be for the silver wiring to be laid, out of the way of boots and claws. Constantly crouching down to lay the wire aggravated the cut, and I glanced back at the healing station, reconsidering getting it checked.

I half expected the last thing I’d see before nothingness to be a brief flash of an explosion from a stray spell striking the barrels, but I finished the channel and returned to find the pits dug. They were almost as deep as two of me, which was good enough. I uncorked the bottom of the barrel to let the water out and carefully lowered it as far down as possible, then dropped it.

The wood cracked, but apart from that, only the sound of screams, growls and warcries invaded my ears. I dropped the next one.

I opened the last barrel and stuck the end of silver deep down into the compact dragon’s breath. I paused before lowering it, unsure if we needed all three. It would always be useful to keep one around. I’d already started to drain it and didn’t want to call Tometh away from the front to ask, so I dropped it down the centre.

“Help me bury them.”

I lifted mounds of dirt from the nearby trenches and dropped it down the holes. The mage didn’t have a spell for that and freecast to help but only lifted half as much. I stomped down the dirt and unwound the wire through the channel I’d made while the mage kicked dirt in to fill the shallow hole.

The wire ended before I’d gone as far as I’d wanted. I groaned and sat in the dirt with the last bit of silver sticking out of the ground, my mare still standing beside me. I was between the main staging area with the archers and the shield wall. Many eyes scrutinised me, questioning what I was doing sitting in the middle of the path. “Go tell the captain I’m ready. Show him where it's buried, and make sure he knows to bring everyone as close to me as possible.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, less mockingly than the first.

I adjusted the quiver at my waist and unhooked my bow. My bag and poleaxe were somewhere in the mess behind me, but I didn’t need it for now.

“Orderly retreat! On my say so,” Tometh shouted, sending out a set of pulses to ask for more volleys to cover them. The captains behind me called for certain spells and bows to be drawn before unleashing them on the hoard. The ghouls' constant draw on the surrounding mana affected the spells and mana bolts that hit them directly, making them less effective. But the thrown ice spikes and fireballs were already manifested and tore through their numbers.

“Thrust! Disengage! Step back!”

An array of steel and leather boots stomping in the dirt slowly backed towards my seat. The shield wall retreated over the barrels, and my heart almost stopped of stress from images of them disappearing in a wall of fire. Or perhaps it was the blood loss.

The knife wound had stopped spilling blood, but it wasn’t something my abnormal healing could catch up to with me aggravating it so much. All the mages, ghouls, and the marble wall were eating up the ambient mana, leaving scraps for me to fight for.”

“What do you think you’re doing? Captain Tometh! Captain Kera! You do not retreat. That is an order.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

I’d turned around, anticipating it had been me being questioned at first, and found a mounted captain in a more ornamental version of Tometh’s armour. The two captains on the front ignored him, each standing behind one side of the shield wall to ensure the retreat went smoothly.

More ghouls were infesting the ditches and getting past the first lines of spikes, sometimes skewering themselves. Archers in the towers and mages picked them off, but some of the spells did more damage to the defences than the ghouls.

“Girl, you’re in the way,” said the same captain.

Tometh was close enough now to both command and respond to the captain, saving me from saying something rude.

“She’s under my direction, Hauser. Leave her be.”

“This whole fiasco seems to be under your direction. Why have we not pushed to the gatehouse yet?”

Tometh crouched down to talk with me instead. He was splattered in black blood with his mana reserves drained. “This enough?”

I nodded and showed him the wire. “It’s as far as I can go. Should we wait for the stronger variants to cross over before detonating?”

He looked up to the very annoyed Captain Hauser. “No, the good captain is at least right that this is a mess right now. The front has to be switched. We need to get a coherent unit together instead of this mismatch. Do it.”

I took a deep breath and held my thumb above the end of the silver.

“What exactly are you two doing?” Hauser asked.

“Brace! Brace!” Tometh also took up the shout, telling his troops to raise their shields and be sure-footed. My thumb hit the silver, and I shoved mana down the length.

Hauser’s next question was interrupted by a thunderclap. The ground shuddered, and I was glad to be sitting. Tometh wobbled while crouched and fell on his ass. Haiser’s horse reared back, but my mare was steady due to my comfort. Mana shields flared up all around us.

It didn’t save them from being pelted by dirt clumps that took a full ten seconds to start landing around us with pieces of ghoul intermixed.

I couldn't see the shield wall, but after getting over the shock of the explosion, they still held firm against the ghouls thrown into them by the force of the dragon’s breath.

Tometh recovered quickly and stepped up to the saddle Hauser had fallen out of to get a better vantage point. I gritted my teeth and held my stomach, getting up on my mare with her assistance.

The crater was more vast than I imagined, the edges of it travelling well into the defences. It didn’t reach as close to our lines or the castle gate, maybe twenty paces across.

“Press ahead! Drive them into the pit.”

At Tometh’s command, the shield wall bashed forward. It was accompanied by blasts of air and thrusts of spears. All the remaining ghouls on our side of the crater were dead or tumbling back into the abyss. Those still pouring through the castle were hit with volley after volley before being driven into the pit ahead or getting to brave the trenches and spikes if they were on the peripheries.

“Continue forward!” Captain Hauser said, getting up and dusting himself. “Rout these monsters.”

None moved.

“Everyone hold. To the healers, if you have even the slightest scratch, otherwise it will fester. Mages replenish your mana. Captain Kera, swap out the shield bearers with your and Captain Jestile’s unit. Get me Captain Aderkin and his archers; have them shoot into the pit.”

“There is a seniority to these things, Tometh…Get down off my horse.”

“You’re welcome to participate in giving orders with those of us”—he gestured to himself and Captain Kera—“who are on the front line.”

“You belong with the cavalry, of which there is no place for here.”

The exhausted and battered bunch holding the shield wall filtered past us to rest and heal while fresh troops in clean, uniform chainmail with two sets of matching insignias took their place. Archers with longbows came after to stand at the pit's edge and shoot down into it.

More ghouls were going through the lines of ditches, of which there were not many separating us and them. Some militia stood at the outer edges of the defensive rings, ready to meet the few that made it through.

Tometh handed the horse's reins back to Hauser as the captains in the back line were calling for answers and a strategy meeting. I was happy to stay where I was, but Tometh snapped his fingers at me and jerked his head towards the gathering captains.

“Do I really?” I asked.

His smouldering glare didn’t have me testing his patience for much longer, and I slipped off my mare to trot after him. Regrettably, he asked a passing runner to take her away.

“Sir! Sir.” A shorter woman in chainmail came running up. “The 2nd is waiting along the street. We were not permitted in with the horses.”

“Very good, adjutant. We don’t want them here for now. Meet Valeria, Valeria this is Sennal. Treat her orders as my own.”

“No issue there,” I said quickly, uninterested in his orders to begin with.

He sighed as if understanding that. “We have a meeting to go to.”

“It’s why I’m here, sir.”

The impromptu meeting was held underneath a watchtower, where the constant shade prevented the grass from growing as long as its surroundings. I climbed up to sit on the support beam above as the circle grew with captains and their adjutants and 2nds all fighting for a prominent position.

“Before anything else, such as spells capable of upheaving the ground, bog down our proceedings,” a woman said before everyone had settled. “I feel we need to ask how is it we were woken per Tometh’s instruction before the attack took place.”

The poor captain was the most harried out of all of them, having expended the most mana and been nearest the fighting. I wanted to shadow-walk myself out of their view before he turned all the attention on him my way, but the rising sun had chased most shadows away.

He still stepped into the circle with a straight back. “We received advanced warning. Not enough to act on, but enough to deliberate over. Things obviously got out of hand in the meantime.”

“Indeed…What was the nature of this warning?”

“An informant. From inside the witch-affiliated group responsible for this.”

“That’s not a good enough answer. What witches?” Hauser interrupted. “And who the fuck is this girl listing in on our proceedings?”

I turned to Tometh for a deflection or excuse, but he simply replied, “The informant.”

“And how—”

“She was tracking the group that attacked Drasda, which led her here,” Tometh said. “To the same group.”

“Who do you work under in Drasda?” another asked, eyes narrowed.

“Ah, Jeremy?” I said, figuring the chief of information gathering was the best answer.

There was a collective groan from a few of the meeting’s participants, generally the older captains. “The norths’ de facto spymaster is sticking his nose in our dealings now.” “Lovely.” “Lock this one up and throw away the key.” “Lock her up for associating with witches, spy or not.”

“Her information is why we’ve held the line so well thus far. If our people weren’t already awake and outfitted when this attack took place, we would be defending street to street right now.”

“And?” Hauser said. “What did she know? Why would she go to a young captain on the eve of an attack of this scale?”

I kicked out my feet from my perch, hoping Tometh would help, but he didn’t. “...I had a prior run-in with the captain, and when I heard of the attack, I broke my cover and went to him, to my own detriment, might I add. I didn’t know what and when it was to take place.”

“And that chasm in the land you just helped make?”

“Dragon’s breath stolen from witches who wanted to use it to destroy part of the city. The captain and I stopped it,” I said, hoping giving him credit would make him more helpful. “You’re welcome.”

“You didn’t want to discuss that with us before blowing half our field of battle away?” Another asked. “And attracting another batch of ghouls.”

“If you were at the front where the decisions were being made, you could have had a say. I don’t see it as a blunder, even in hindsight,” Tometh said, grumbling under his breath. “Besides allowing us this meeting.”

“Do we have more?” Hauser asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“Can we make more?”

Nope.”

“You lying shit.”

“Enough, Hauser.”

The conversation was realigned into troop movement and the minutiae of managing mana and cycling out mages from the front. Arrows needed to be made as we were already a tenth through those stored.

Half of those present wanted to push to the gatehouse and start blocking it, while the others wanted to wait it out behind our shield line and deepen our defences. The argument grew more heated as words like ‘coward’ and ‘brash’ were thrown around.

I raised my hand and tried to get Tometh’s attention quietly, but he and his adjutant were arguing the merits of a static defence over a good offence.

I sighed, put my fingers to my lips, and whistled.

The dirt in the centre raised at my command to form four rings representing the capital, with a little block for each gatehouse and a house for each settlement. “Are you all forgetting there are three other gates plus the holes in the wall? That three other districts full of ghouls you haven’t spent decades culling are on their way?”

An older captain shook his head. “Girl, we’ve been doing this for longer than you’ve lived. Forcibly attracting ghouls with sound will die down quickly. It was louder than the bell we usually use, which would explain the increased numbers. This will die off by mid-morning, and only because of you and Tometh’s added theatrics. We have runners on their way to check on and warn the others.”

“Well,” I said, ignoring the sneers and creating a line of dirt buildings from our settlement to the abbey. “I don’t think these ghouls are being drawn by sound. The witches have created a line of warding runes, similar to our enchantments, along both sides of the main street from the 3rd wall to the 2nd and possibly the 1st.”

“We know what runes are brat.” “And you know this because…?”

“Because I was there when they made it?” I mocked. “They said it was for safe passage to the interior, but I think it's so the ghouls are funnelled down this main road by another set of lure runes. Have any of you seen the variants that live in the interior? Sensed how much mana they soak up?

I pointed to the ghouls still spilling through. “These things are the weakest, and they’re already pushing us back.”

“Are we expected to believe a lone mage survived in the 2nd ring, alone with these mana-hungry abominations?” Hauser asked. “Expected to believe someone out gallivanting with these witches none of the greatest witch hunters in the kingdom knew of?”

“Fine, don’t believe me, but I’m warning you. This isn’t going to end unless we kill them all or those runes are destroyed. They’re already on top of the walls and will crowd up at our entrance. A single lure could have them swarm through one of the other gatehouses. A single variant could punch through our defences.”

“We? Our? Who does this outsider think she is?”

“We can use the trebs to target the houses with the runes,” Tometh offered before anyone else could argue. “Shore up our defences around the pit; try to block the gate.”

“A static defence makes more sense then,” Captain Kera said. “Sending a team to punch through or go around is pointless suicide. If these runes even exist.”

“Perhaps blocking the gate isn’t in our best interest since they will be more inclined to go to other settlements or atop the walls and fall into the many part-destroyed areas. I doubt the drop would kill them.”

“And call every duchy for reinforcements,” I added but received no backup.

“This is a capital problem,” Tometh said. “We will deal with it. Now, how detailed can you make this little diorama of yours?”

Yistopher

I yanked my coat from a hanger and passed a crouched Sweeka, thinking she could pounce on whoever was banging on our door so early. I ripped it, ready to grumble the ears off of the mage outside.

The young knight on the other side of the door didn’t even flinch, and I lamented my loss of ability to scare the youths. The banging didn’t stop despite the knight's fist raised into a salute rather than rapping against my door. “Morning, sir.”

I leaned outside to find more knights banging on the doors of those I knew were at least tangentially involved in the military. “What’s going on?”

The knight's destrier was in full kit, not for a cavalry charge or morning outing, but for a long march. “We don’t know, sir. Those of us in the bastion were sent out with a list of names and addresses. The officers suspect we’re off to the capital by the maps being handed out.”

I motioned for the paper and read through the list of twenty-odd names. “You all have this many? This is the entire order and then some.”

He nodded, a mixture of trepidation and excitement on his face. “Yes, sir. Army runners have been going back and forth from the castle. The commander and duke are in the lower bailey right now, organising two weeks of food and enough arrows to kill an army. All leave is cancelled, and everyone is kitting up for a march.”

I turned away before he could finish, collecting my sword, beret and faded uniform from where it hung. “I’ll need a horse and plate.”

“Already arranged, sir. We have carts buying out entire smithies at the moment. The army’s 3rd logistics detachment is also already assembling outside the city.”

“Anyone let it slip they’re dragging a retiree into this?”

“You’ll have to ask the commander, sir. I have other names I need to get through…if you’ll excuse me.” The knight saluted again, but I was too busy stuffing a bag full of spare socks to return it.

…

The castle drawbridge was a mess of mounted runners ignoring all regulations and galloping at full speed across it, dispersing into the city. No one bothered to check identities as carts laden with food, weapons and tents rolled through. Half-dressed knights who lived with their families outside the bastion were lugging in their weapons and bags.

Sweeka was curled up on my duffle bag, refusing to be left alone at home or with the neighbours.

A procession of covered waggons sat on the path from the outer gate to the inner. Horses and their riders covered the grounds to either side as they donned the last of their gear and grouped into squads.

I found Faraya, Jeremy, and Duke Riker amid the chaos, entertaining runners lining up to relay messages. “What’s happening?”

Faraya looked stressed, and I sympathised, having organised a similar march but with weeks of preparation. “It’s Valeria; she’s at the capital.”

Sweeka perked up at the name, and I swallowed a sigh of relief; we’d begun to think the girl was gone for good. “Not that she wouldn’t appreciate the spectacle coming to get her, but why the force?”

Jeremy handed me a slip of paper. “Read that and game out the worst-case scenario involving a group of witches at the capital.”

I suppressed a shiver of the hundreds of thousands of abominations still trapped inside the walls getting out. “Yeah…I hope you’re sending more than us.”

“Army is offering logistics, and their mounted reconnaissance is joining us en route,” Faraya said. “Infantry will be bringing up the rear so we can make good time. The neighbouring duchies haven’t responded to our request for help, but the closest barron is sending a group to check what’s happening.

I apologise for this, but I have to put it plainly. There is only one commander on this mission; you’re here to advise when asked and as a courtesy.”

My younger self would have demanded a duel on the spot. Age had shaved away and tempered my once abundant ego. “I understand, commander. I appreciate being brought in.”

She breathed a sigh of relief, and I suppressed a smirk; perhaps I still had some scare left in me.

…

Those still in their homes and on the street after the morning rush were treated to a rare sight. I rode at the head of a procession of knights in full regalia, carrying banners depicting a castle between the lake and Red Forest.

There were parades throughout the year, but none were followed by a line of wagons capable of outfitting, sleeping, and feeding an army for a week. Children gazed up with stars in their eyes at the glinting armour and array of weaponry strapped to horses they could run under without ducking.

Their parents looked on worriedly, understanding the meaning of the march, but that was Jeremy and Vince’s problem to deal with.

Another set of army wagons integrated into our caravan, carrying camp staff and other provisions. We all turned off the main path to the lesser-used road towards the capital, settling into a steady pace for the three-day trek.