[Complete] Ch 5.6 Release that Witch... and Wizard?! (Patreon)

Release that Witch…

and Wizard?!

Disclaimer: All characters here are at least 18. Hogwarts starts later, so by the time Harry arrives, he’s 19. Cheng Yen (陈嫣) was in her mid-20s before waking up in the 21-year-old body of Garcia Wimbledon. Witches gain their first awakening upon adulthood, at 18 years of age.

Story Starts

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Chapter 5.6 -

Preparation for the 

Months of the Demons

The broom hovered at waist height, its polished handle gleaming in the bruise-purple light before dawn. Harry had retrieved it from that bottomless pouch of his—a Firebolt, he'd called it. Garcia had to suppress a snort at the stereotype of a flying broomstick. Though she had to admit the thing looked sleek, almost elegant—less cleaning implement than racing instrument. It would have made a fine showpiece mounted on a wall, if she didn't mind everyone in the castle questioning her sanity.

Garcia stood at the castle's upper courtyard, the stone balustrade cold against her lower back. Behind her, a modest assembly had gathered in various states of wakefulness. Anna stood closest, her breath making small ghosts in the frigid air. Nana clutched Anna's arm, her round face pinched against the cold despite the thick wool coat Garcia had ordered for her. Sir Pine—Nana's father, a minor noble with the posture of a man perpetually braced for the next blow life intended to deliver—hovered behind his daughter like a reluctant shadow. Barov had wrapped himself in what appeared to be every white robe he owned, his grey beard tucked into the topmost layer for warmth. Carter Lannis stood in full armour, because of course he did.

Nightingale had revealed herself to Barov and Carter only the previous evening, at her own insistence. She'd stepped out of the Mist in the middle of the dining hall—violet eyes steady, golden hair catching the candlelight—and declared that she wished the Witch Cooperation Association to be considered partners. Not supplicants, not refugees. Partners with Border Town. Carter had drawn his sword. Barov had knocked over his wine. Harry had continued eating.

The negotiations that followed had been brief, largely because Garcia had already decided to agree, and Nightingale's truth-sensing meant there was no point in posturing. Carter had spent the remainder of the evening looking like a man who'd swallowed something that disagreed with him.

Now, in the predawn gloom, Garcia watched Harry perform his final checks on the broom. His hands ran along the shaft, testing each bristle cluster, fingers gliding from tip to tail with practised care. He caught Garcia and Nightingale watching and winked.

Garcia felt heat creep up her neck. Beside her, Nightingale's composure held—but only just.

'He knows exactly what that looked like.'

"Right then." He straightened, brushing his palms on that long black coat of his. The green lining caught a flicker of torchlight. He turned to Anna first.

Anna moved before he could speak. She crossed the flagstones in three quick steps and wrapped her arms around his midsection, pressing her face into his chest. The gesture was sudden and fierce and entirely unlike the quiet, careful girl Garcia had come to know over the past weeks. Harry's eyebrows rose—a flash of surprise—before his expression softened into something private. He rested one hand on the back of Anna's head and ruffled her hair with the careless affection of an older brother.

Perhaps more.

Garcia's eyebrow climbed. She hadn't realised they'd grown that close. The dungeon, she supposed—those hours chained opposite one another, facing execution together. That kind of crucible forged bonds that weeks of ordinary acquaintance couldn't replicate. And all the time since, living side by side in the backyard cottage, the only barrier between them a wall and a woman who could turn invisible at will.

She filed it away.

Anna released him and stepped back, her pale blue eyes bright but dry. She said nothing. She didn't need to.

Harry opened his arms towards Nana with a theatrical flourish. "Come on, then. Can't play favourites."

Nana darted forward with a small squeak and hugged him around the waist. Sir Pine's mouth compressed into a line so thin it nearly vanished into his moustache. A low rumble of fatherly displeasure escaped his throat.

Harry released Nana, winked at Sir Pine—which did nothing for the man's complexion—and then turned to Garcia. His green eyes glinted with that specific brand of mischief she'd learnt to recognise as a prelude to something idiotic.

He spread his arms wide. One corner of his mouth curled upward in a smirk that practically dared her.

"Your Highness? Don't want to feel left out, do we?"

"Your Highness!" Carter's hand went to his sword hilt. His face had gone a shade of red that Garcia associated with imminent violence. "The sheer insolence—"

Garcia shook her head, lips pressed together to keep from laughing. "Safe travels, Potter. Try not to fall off."

Harry clutched his chest as though wounded, then swung one leg over the Firebolt with fluid grace. The broom dipped slightly under his weight before steadying. He settled into position and glanced back at Carter, whose jaw was still clenched hard enough to crack a walnut.

Harry stuck out his tongue.

Carter sputtered.

"Right," Harry said, patting the broom handle behind him. "Nightingale. Hop on."

Nightingale emerged from the Mist like a figure stepping out of fog—one moment absent, the next entirely present, golden hair stirring in the predawn breeze. She'd changed into travelling clothes: dark trousers, a fitted leather jerkin, boots that laced to the knee. A heavy canvas pack hung from one shoulder, packed with goods Garcia had assembled—samples of cement, sketches of the wall, a sealed letter bearing her personal seal, and enough salted meat and dried fruit to sustain two people for several days.

Nightingale swung onto the broom behind Harry with athletic ease, settling the pack between them. Her hands found the broom handle—gripping it at a point that made Harry go very still.

"Woah, woah, woah." His voice had acquired a strained quality. "Take care of the goods. Perhaps—Nightingale, if you wouldn't mind adjusting your grip. Slightly. Rearward. To my waist, maybe."

Nightingale's violet eyes sparkled with something that was definitely amusement. "The handle provides better stability."

"The handle provides proximity to areas that—look, just hold my waist, would you? We don't want accidents midflight."

Nightingale shifted her grip with deliberate slowness, wrapping her arms around Harry's midsection. Her expression remained perfectly composed, though Garcia caught the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth.

"Careful with the goods, Potter," Garcia called up. "They're rather valuable, given what they've accomplished."

"Yes, yes—those goods as well. Nightingale, careful with the pack—don't jostle it against the—"

"I have it."

"Right. Good. Lovely. Should have brought more mokeskin pouches." Harry adjusted his glasses, squared his shoulders, and leant forward. "See you in a few days. Don't burn the town down without me."

The Firebolt shot upward.

Garcia watched them rise—two silhouettes against the deep indigo of the sky, Harry's coat streaming behind him like a banner, Nightingale's golden hair a bright ribbon in the dark. They banked eastward, climbing higher, growing smaller, until they were a speck against the fading stars, and then nothing at all.

The courtyard fell quiet.

Garcia stood there a moment longer, the leather pouch resting in her right hand. The system had materialised it that morning—a physical reward container, modest in weight but significant in what it represented. She turned it over with her thumb, feeling the grain of the leather.

'The gacha pulls.' Her system interface flickered at the edge of her awareness—the familiar translucent overlay that appeared whenever her thoughts brushed against it. In the upper corner, a small icon blinked steadily. Bonus Rewards Available.

She'd earned them. Ten pulls for completing the industrial revolution mission, plus the bonus she'd been chasing. She'd held off claiming them, wanting to squeeze one more technology into the count before the deadline. Her original plan had been to prioritise a third steam engine—something for the mines—but the wall's defence had taken precedence. Gunpowder had won out over convenience.

Not that the steam engines were wasted. The two she'd built were operational, and a third was nearly complete—it simply wouldn't be finished before the Months of the Demons arrived, which was the mission's deadline. The standardised measurement system had counted as a separate achievement, at least. Small mercies.

She'd examine the rewards later. In private. Away from eyes that might question why their princess was staring at empty air and tapping invisible menus.

Something cold touched her forearm.

Garcia looked down. A single snowflake sat on her skin, perfect and geometric, already dissolving into a bead of moisture against her warmth.

She looked up.

The sky carried a faint grey haze along the northern horizon. As she watched, another flake drifted past her face. Then another. Then a dozen, spiralling lazily downward like ash from a distant fire.

The temperature had dropped three degrees in the last five minutes. She could feel it in her fingers, in the tightening of the skin across her cheeks.

"It's starting," Barov said.

His voice aimed for flat and nearly got there—though the slight hitch was understandable. Barov had served the crown for decades, but always from the safety of the capital or the Stronghold. He'd never stood in Border Town and watched the Months of the Demons begin. He stood at Garcia's shoulder now, watching the snow thicken, his breath emerging in dense clouds.

Garcia held her forearm out, palm up. Snowflakes landed and melted, landed and melted, each one a tiny cold kiss. In her other hand, the pouch sat with its modest, world-changing weight.

"The wall," she said, without looking away from the sky. "How does it stand?"

Barov drew himself up slightly. There was something in his posture—not pride exactly, but the cautious satisfaction of a man who'd watched an impossible thing get done and was still waiting for reality to catch up with itself.

"Completed, Your Highness. Karl Van Bates finished the final section of the parapet two days ago. The mortar has fully set." He paused, as though weighing whether to volunteer the next part. "Your... workers. The small ones. They were remarkably efficient. The townsmen who volunteered for paid labour also pushed through admirably."

Garcia glanced at him. The small ones. Barov still couldn't bring himself to say house-elves without looking as though the words might bite him.

"The house-elves moved approximately four times the stone that Karl's human labourers could manage in the same period," Barov continued, consulting a mental ledger that Garcia suspected he maintained with the same fastidious care as his physical ones. "Foundations that Karl estimated would take three weeks were laid in five days. The wall stands three metres high along its full length from North Slope Mountain to the Redwater River, with emplacements at twenty-metre intervals as you specified. Karl has requested additional workers for a second layer come spring, but the current structure exceeds the defensive specifications you outlined."

Garcia nodded. The snow was falling faster now—a steady curtain of white descending over Border Town. In the distance, she could see the dark line of the wall stretching across the landscape like a scar.

Her scar. Her wall.

'Built with magic, mortar, and the stubbornness of people who'd been told something was impossible.'

She turned towards the castle entrance, and the assembled group fell into step behind her—Anna and Nana side by side, Sir Pine a half-pace behind his daughter, Barov at Garcia's left shoulder, Carter bringing up the rear with his hand still resting on his sword hilt, as though Harry might circle back for another round of insolence.

The warmth of the castle's interior hit Garcia's face like a gentle hand. Torches lined the corridor, their heat a welcome contrast to the biting cold outside. The flagstones were dry—Poddey's doing. The house-elf had taken to mopping every surface in the castle at four-hour intervals with an enthusiasm that bordered on the pathological.

"Carter," Garcia said, not slowing her stride.

"Your Highness."

"Send word to Iron Axe. I want him and his best men assembled at the wall by midmorning." She paused at the junction where the corridor split—left towards the great hall, right towards her study. "And Carter? Have them bring animals. Not livestock—rabbits, deer, whatever they can catch. Three or four should suffice."

Carter's brow furrowed. "Your Highness?"

"For a demonstration." Garcia turned right, towards her study, the blinking reward notification already tugging at the edge of her vision. The pouch sat warm in her hand. "I have something to show them."

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The snow had not relented.

By midmorning, it fell in thick, slanting curtains that turned the world beyond arm's reach into a featureless grey blur. The temperature had plummeted—Garcia could feel it even through the heavy fur-lined cloak she'd donned, even through the wool underlayers and the charmed gloves Harry had left behind. The cold was aggressive, personal, pushing through fabric and leather as though it had something to prove.

Garcia strode down Border Town's central thoroughfare with Carter Lannis at her right shoulder and four palace guards in formation behind them. Her boots crunched through a centimetre of fresh powder. The sound was curiously satisfying—crisp and clean, like snapping fresh parchment.

The town was not empty.

This was the thing that struck her, even as her mind churned through the calculations that had consumed every waking hour for the past month. Normally—according to Barov, according to Carter, according to every person she'd consulted—Border Town evacuated at the first snowfall. The population would stream south to Longsong Stronghold, abandoning homes and possessions to the demonic beasts that descended from the Impassable Mountain Range during winter. The town would sit hollow and dark for three months, four if the season was cruel, waiting to be reoccupied come spring by whoever hadn't died of poverty or neglect in the Stronghold's slums.

Not this year.

Smoke rose from chimneys. A blacksmith's hammer rang from a workshop two streets over—a steady, rhythmic clanging that spoke of someone with work to do and no intention of stopping. A woman emerged from a doorway, saw Garcia, performed a hasty curtsey that nearly tipped her into a snowdrift, and ducked back inside. Two children chased each other around a corner, their laughter bright and sharp in the muffled air, before an adult voice called them back.

People had stayed.

Not all of them—perhaps half the town's population had departed south as usual, the pull of tradition and fear too strong. But the rest had looked at the wall, looked at the provisions Garcia had stockpiled, looked at the wages she was paying for construction and maintenance work, and made a calculation. Not an emotional one. An economic one. The same cold arithmetic that had governed their lives for twenty-eight years, except now the numbers favoured staying.

'Grain in the storehouse. Coin in the pocket. A wall between you and what's coming.'

Garcia felt a flicker of something she chose not to examine too closely. Something dangerously close to pride.

The pouch bounced against her hip with each stride. She'd transferred it to a belt loop that morning, after examining its contents in her study—after the rewards, the notifications, the quiet thrill of seeing her system confirm what she already knew.

Gunpowder.

The word sat in her mind with a weight that belied its two syllables. Cannons were years away—dependent on metallurgical progress she hadn't yet achieved. But the substance itself was immediate. Fundamental. The first true weapon she could put in ordinary hands.

It had started three weeks ago, during a routine meeting with Karl and Barov. Supply figures, waste disposal logistics, the tedious but necessary arithmetic of keeping a settlement functional. Karl had mentioned the tailings—twenty-eight years of waste rock, piled in enormous heaps outside the North Slope Mine entrance. Mountains of rubble that generations of miners had cursed and carted and dumped without a second thought.

"The yellowish ones are the worst," Karl had said, waving a dismissive hand. "Fool's gold. The men used to throw them at each other for sport. Twenty-eight years of the stuff, just sitting there."

Fool's gold. Pyrite. Iron sulphide—FeS₂.

Garcia had felt the recognition hit her like a physical blow. She'd excused herself from the meeting, walked calmly to her study, closed the door, and pulled up Wikipedia so fast she'd nearly given herself a nosebleed from the interface's response lag.

There it was. Pyrite. Fifty-three per cent sulphur by weight. Sitting in waste piles outside a mine she'd written off because its tunnels had collapsed.

She hadn't needed the tunnels. She'd needed the rubbish.

The irony was almost too perfect. Twenty-eight years of miners discarding the one substance that could have transformed Border Town from a backwater mining outpost into a strategic military position. Every brass-yellow chunk of pyrite they'd kicked aside, every resinous brown lump of sphalerite they'd tossed onto the waste heaps—each one a fragment of a puzzle nobody had known they were assembling.

Garcia had moved fast after that. The production chain was straightforward—on paper, at least. In practice, it had required every resource she'd painstakingly assembled over the preceding weeks.

First: the retort. A sealed cast-iron vessel designed to heat ore in an enclosed environment. Open-air roasting was useless—it burned the sulphur off as toxic SO₂ gas, wasting the very substance she needed to capture. The vessel had to be airtight, durable enough to withstand sustained temperatures above four hundred and fifty degrees, and fitted with a condensation pipe to channel sulphur vapour into a cooled collection vessel.

Garcia had sketched the specifications herself. Harry had transfigured the mould—his magic shaping the sand casting form with a precision no human hand could match, every dimension accurate to the millimetre markings they'd established using his height as a base unit. Anna had melted the iron, pouring it into the mould with her controlled flame, the metal flowing white-hot and obedient under her direction. The same workflow they'd used for cement kiln fittings and steam engine components—adapted seamlessly.

The condensation pipe had been simpler. Copper was abundant in the tailings—another gift from twenty-eight years of accumulated waste. Karl's labourers had beaten and rolled sheets of salvaged copper into tubing under Garcia's direction, connecting the retort's neck to a clay collection vessel that sat in a basin of cold water.

The ore itself had been almost laughably easy to obtain. Garcia had sent a work crew to the waste piles with simple instructions: collect the brass-yellow metallic rocks—cubic crystals, pale gold lustre, unmistakable once you knew what to look for—and the resinous brown ones with their distinctive waxy sheen. The miners had known exactly which rocks she meant. They'd been tripping over them for decades.

Crushing came next. Manual labour with hammers—fist-sized chunks broken down to walnut-sized fragments for maximum surface area. Tedious, physical work, but the kind Border Town's labourers understood intimately.

Then the extraction itself.

Anna had been magnificent.

Garcia closed her eyes briefly as she walked, remembering. The retort loaded with crushed pyrite, its seals packed tight with iron paste. The copper pipe angling downward into the water-cooled collection pot. Anna standing beside the apparatus with that quiet focus she brought to everything, her pale blue eyes fixed on the retort's surface as though she could see the heat moving through the metal.

The temperature calibration had been Garcia's proudest innovation. She'd placed a small piece of zinc—recovered from sphalerite in the same tailings—inside a separate open crucible beside the retort. Zinc melted at four hundred and nineteen degrees. When the zinc softened, then pooled into liquid, Anna was approaching the target range. When it sat liquid and calm—not bubbling, not roiling, just quietly molten—she was in the sweet spot.

"Heat until the zinc melts, then hold it steady," Garcia had told her. "Keep it liquid but calm."

Anna had nodded once, and her magic had flowed into the retort like water finding its level. Steady. Controlled. The temperature rising in smooth increments until the zinc shimmered, softened, and pooled into a bright silver puddle.

Harry had cast Bubble-Head Charms on everyone within thirty metres—a precaution against SO₂ leaks that Garcia had insisted upon after reading Wikipedia's toxicology entries. The shimmering bubbles of clean air encasing each worker's head had given the site a faintly absurd quality, though nobody was laughing. Anna hadn't needed one. Her flames seemed to consume any stray gas that drifted near her—an unexpected property of her fire that Garcia filed away for future investigation.

The first wisps of sulphur vapour had appeared within twenty minutes. Garcia had watched through the collection vessel's transparent walls—a luxury afforded by Harry's conjuration—as yellow fumes crept down the copper pipe, hit the cool interior of the pot, and condensed. First as a thin oily film on the vessel's walls. Then as droplets. Then as a growing pool of liquid sulphur, bright and viscous and unmistakable.

When it cooled, it solidified into a crystalline yellow mass. Garcia had scraped it out with a wooden spatula, held it up to the light, and felt the grin spreading across her face before she could stop it.

Sulphur. Pure, usable, beautiful sulphur. Extracted from garbage.

The charcoal had been trivial—burned from willow wood in a low-oxygen pit, a process so ancient and well-understood that Garcia's labourers had barely needed instruction. The saltpetre she'd purchased from traders weeks earlier, ostensibly for meat preservation. Three components. Three sources. One product.

She'd ground each separately in a stone mortar—never together, never mixed while grinding, because a single spark in a combined powder would have ended her industrial revolution before it began. The grinding had been meditative, almost pleasant. Charcoal first, reduced to fine black dust. Saltpetre next, its crystalline grains crushing into white powder with a faintly bitter smell. Sulphur last, its yellow fragments yielding to the pestle with a satisfying crunch.

Then the mixing. Seventy-five parts saltpetre. Fifteen parts charcoal. Ten parts sulphur. By weight, measured on the balance scales Harry had conjured—precise instruments with brass pans and calibrated counterweights that would have made any master craftsman weep with envy.

The first batch had been small. A proof of concept—enough to fill a teacup. Garcia had moistened the mixture slightly, pressed it into a thin cake on a flat stone, let it dry overnight, then crumbled it into coarse granules. Corned powder. More stable, more powerful, more consistent than the loose serpentine alternative.

The test had been conducted at dawn, behind the kiln, with Anna standing by to provide remote ignition. Garcia had packed a small quantity into a sealed clay pot with a hemp fuse trailing from a hole in the lid. She'd placed it on an open patch of ground, retreated twenty metres, and nodded to Anna.

A thin lance of flame had leapt from Anna's fingertip, precise as a surgeon's blade, and kissed the fuse.

The crack had echoed off North Slope Mountain and come back to them three times. The clay pot had ceased to exist. In its place: a shallow crater in the frozen earth, ringed by fragments of shattered pottery and a dissipating cloud of white smoke that smelled of rotten eggs and thunderstorms.

Garcia had stood there, ears ringing, snow settling on her shoulders, and thought:

'That's the sound of the future.'

Since then, she'd produced six more batches—each larger, each more refined. The tailings provided functionally unlimited pyrite. Anna's daily extraction sessions served double duty: sulphur production and the intensive magical exercise that Harry had theorised would protect her from the demonic bite. The house-elves had taken over the grinding and mixing under Garcia's supervision, their small, precise hands ideal for the delicate work of measuring and combining.

The pouch at her hip contained her finest batch yet. Two kilograms of corned black powder, sealed in waxed leather against the moisture that would render it useless. Enough for what she had planned.

The wall emerged from the snowfall like a cliff face rising from fog.

Three metres of solid stone, stretching in an unbroken line from the dark mass of North Slope Mountain on her left to the frozen banks of the Redwater River on her right. The cement—her cement, Anna's cement—bound every block with a grey permanence that made the structure look less like something built and more like something that had always been there, waiting beneath the landscape for someone to uncover it. Emplacements jutted from the top at regular intervals—squared-off platforms where defenders could stand and fire downward. A walkway ran along the wall's inner face, accessed by stone stairs at four points along its length.

It was, Garcia reflected, the single most impressive thing she'd accomplished in either of her lives. And she'd done it in under two months.

Iron Axe stood at the wall's central stairway with twenty-three men arrayed behind him. They were a motley assembly—hunters, woodsmen, a few former miners, three fishermen who'd apparently decided that military service paid better than winter unemployment. They wore leather armour of varying quality and carried an assortment of weapons: crossbows, longbows, short spears, hunting knives. Not one of them matched another. They looked less like a military unit and more like a particularly well-armed crowd that had wandered in from the same tavern.

But they stood straight. They stood quiet. And when Garcia approached, they parted to let her through with a disciplined precision that spoke of Iron Axe's training over the past weeks.

Iron Axe himself was lean and weathered, his age impossible to pin down—somewhere between thirty and fifty, with the kind of face that looked carved from the same stone as the wall behind him. The scars that mapped his skin—one bisecting his left cheek, others disappearing beneath his collar—spoke of encounters survived rather than battles won. His eyes tracked Garcia's approach with the calm assessment of a predator watching something that wasn't prey but wasn't irrelevant either.

To one side, penned behind a hastily assembled wooden fence, four sheep huddled together against the cold. They looked as miserable as sheep generally did, which was to say: profoundly, philosophically miserable, as though the entire concept of existence had been explained to them and they'd found it wanting.

'I asked for rabbits,' Garcia thought. 'Close enough.'

Garcia stopped three paces in front of Iron Axe.

"Iron Axe."

"Your Highness." He inclined his head—not a bow, but an acknowledgement of rank that carried genuine respect. Iron Axe was not a man given to bowing.

Garcia looked past him at the assembled men. Twenty-three faces, reddened by cold, watching her with expressions that ranged from curious to wary to carefully blank. These were the men who would hold the wall when the demonic beasts came. These were the men who would stand between Border Town and annihilation with crossbows and courage and whatever else Garcia could put in their hands.

She intended to put quite a lot in their hands.

"Gentlemen," she said, and her voice carried in the muffled air with the clarity that came from speaking against snowfall—every sound sharpened by contrast with the silence between flakes. "What I am about to show you does not leave this wall. What you see today, what you hear today, what you learn today—it stays here. Among us. Is that understood?"

Twenty-three nods. Some immediate, some after a glance at Iron Axe, who gave the faintest dip of his chin.

Carter shifted behind Garcia, his armour creaking. He didn't know what was in the pouch. She'd told him only that she had a new weapon to demonstrate—a statement that had produced the same expression he wore whenever she announced something that would, in his professional estimation, probably get them all killed.

Garcia reached for the pouch at her hip. She loosened the drawstring and poured a small measure into her cupped palm—perhaps a tablespoon's worth. The powder was dark grey, almost black, with a granular texture like coarse sand. It smelled faintly of sulphur—that distinctive tang that Anna's extraction process left as a signature.

She held it out for Iron Axe to inspect.

"This," she said, "is what we will use to defend this wall."

Iron Axe studied the powder with the same quiet intensity he brought to tracking game through heavy forest. He didn't touch it. Didn't ask to smell it. Just looked.

"It's a powder, Your Highness."

"It's a weapon." Garcia closed her fist around the measure and returned it to the pouch. "A weapon that requires no magic to use, no extraordinary strength to wield, and no years of training to master. A weapon that will make every man standing here the equal of any knight in the kingdom."

She let that settle. Watched the reactions ripple through the formation—scepticism, intrigue, the particular species of hope that men who'd spent their lives being told they were expendable wore like armour against disappointment.

"But first," Garcia said, drawing the small clay pot from beneath her cloak—packed with measured powder, sealed with wax, a hemp fuse coiled against its side, "a demonstration."

She turned towards the sheep pen.

"Iron Axe, if you'd be so good as to move one of those animals to open ground. Twenty paces from the wall." She paused. "And then I'd suggest everyone step back."

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End

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