Chapter 57 (Patreon)

Henri's carriage lurched through another rut, and the jolt sent his shoulder into the wooden frame hard enough to bruise.

Three days. Three more days lost to Harold's tricks.

The soldiers who'd breathed that alchemical fog still couldn't march properly. Half of them stumbled like drunks, clutching their heads, stopping every mile to retch into the grass. His sergeants had begged for one more day of rest. Then another. Then a third, because the men who'd pushed through anyway had collapsed on the road and needed to be loaded into wagons that were already overloaded with supplies.

Three days.

Henri's fingers curled against the bench until his knuckles went white.

Through the carriage window, the column stretched back through the forest in a ragged line that bore no resemblance to the crisp formation he'd envisioned. Wagons creaked. Men coughed. Someone was singing—badly—and no one had the energy to make them stop.

This was supposed to be his triumph. The march that announced Lord Henri as a power in the basin. The decisive stroke that broke Harold's expansion before it could threaten anyone else.

Instead, he'd spent two weeks getting harassed by adventurers who melted into the trees the moment his soldiers formed up. He'd lost four wagons to centaur raids that struck at dusk and vanished before his men could respond. He'd watched his tatanka scatter across a hillside while Harold's saboteurs lit fires in the supply train.

And now the forums were talking about Harold again.

Henri had checked that morning, the way he checked every morning, scrolling through the posts while his coffee went cold. The monster nest to the northeast—the one that had overrun a village and killed dozens—was under assault by a coalition Harold had helped organize. Lords from across the sea were coordinating strikes against similar threats, sharing tactics, pooling resources.

Harold was sending healing potions. At cost.

The words had burned in Henri's mind all morning. At cost. Potions that should have been leverage, should have been profit, should have been his once Haven fell—Harold was giving them away to build goodwill with Lords who would never lift a finger to help Henri's campaign.

And the replies. God, the replies.

Good to see someone thinking about more than their own borders.

Landing potions saved three of my people last week. Whatever else you think of Harold, he's doing something good.

Henri's post yesterday was embarrassing. We're fighting for survival and he's worried about "unchecked influence"? Grow up.

Henri had closed the interface before he could read more.

The carriage hit another rut and his teeth clicked together hard enough to send a spike of pain through his jaw. The roads here were barely roads at all—just mud and roots and the occasional stretch of gravel that the tatanka teams hadn't managed to churn into soup.

A knock on the carriage frame. Henri slid the window open.

One of his guards walked alongside, keeping pace easily. "Lord Arjun requests a word, my Lord."

Henri suppressed a sigh. "Send him."

A minute later, Arjun appeared at the window, walking with the steady gait of a man who'd spent the entire march on his feet alongside his soldiers. His boots were caked with mud up to the ankles. His face was set in its usual hard lines, but there was something else there today. Something that looked uncomfortably like doubt.

"What," Henri said.

"Scouts returned. We're less than an hour out."

Henri straightened against the bench. Finally. After everything—the delays, the harassment, the humiliation—they were almost there.

"Formation?"

"Assault columns are ready. The men know the plan."

Henri nodded once. The plan was simple because it had to be. They'd expected a refugee camp with basic defenses—earthworks, maybe a wooden wall, a few dozen defenders. Strike fast, break the resistance, capture or scatter the population, and withdraw across the river before Harold could respond.

"Good." Henri allowed himself a thin smile. "Once we're in sight, we—"

"There's something else."

Arjun's tone stopped him.

"What?"

The other lord was quiet for a moment, his jaw working like he was chewing on words he didn't want to say.

"The scouts described the defenses."

"And?"

"They said we should see for ourselves."

Henri stepped down from the carriage at the tree line and immediately regretted wearing his good boots.

The mud sucked at his soles as he walked forward, past the last of the wagons, past soldiers who straightened as he passed, until he reached the edge of the forest where the land opened up toward the river.

He stopped.

For a long moment, he simply stared.

Haven sat on a rise overlooking the river, and it was not a refugee camp. It was not a collection of tents huddled behind earthworks. It was not the desperate, half-finished settlement his scouts had described three weeks ago.

It was a fort.

Stone foundations rose fourfeet from the ground, massive blocks fitted together with a precision that spoke of real masons and real planning. Above the stone, thick wooden trunks formed a palisade that added another twelve feet to the height, the logs stripped of bark and sharpened at the top into wicked points. Round towers anchored the corners, their walls solid timber braced with iron bands that caught the afternoon light.

Inside the walls, rising above everything else, stood a fortified hall with a peaked roof and narrow windows that would make perfect archer slits. Smoke curled from multiple chimneys. Flags snapped in the breeze—Harold's banner, the sprig and blade, repeated at each corner tower.

Henri heard Arjun's boots squelch through the mud beside him. Heard the other lord's sharp intake of breath.

"That," Arjun said slowly, "is not what we planned for."

Henri's jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached.

Three weeks. He'd been delayed for three weeks by harassment and sabotage and men who couldn't shake off a lungful of sleeping gas. And in those three weeks, Harold had turned a refugee camp into this.

No. That wasn't possible. You couldn't build something like this in three weeks. Which meant Harold had been building it for months, hiding the progress, feeding false intelligence to Henri's scouts while the real work happened out of sight.

Every delay. Every raid. Every wagon fire and scattered tatanka herd.

He was buying time for this.

The realization hit Henri like a physical blow.

Harold hadn't been desperate. Harold hadn't been scrambling to delay the inevitable. Harold had known exactly how long he needed, and he'd spent his adventurers and his centaur allies like coins to purchase every single day.

And Henri had given him those days. Every time he'd stopped to regroup. Every time he'd waited for his men to recover. Every time he'd thought one more day won't matter.

He'd been outmaneuvered from the start.

Arjun's voice cut through his thoughts, flat and hard.

"We don't have siege equipment."

"I'm aware."

"We planned for a raid. Wooden walls. Maybe some trenches. That—" Arjun gestured at the fort. "That requires ladders. Rams. Time."

"I said I'm aware."

Movement on the walls. Henri squinted against the light and saw figures appearing along the palisade, clustering at the towers, lining the rampart above the gate. Dozens of them. More than dozens.

Too many for a refugee camp. Too many for the token garrison his intelligence had promised.

And then, carried on the wind, he heard it.

Singing.

Faint at first, just a rhythm. Then the words resolved, dozens of voices joining together, and Henri's stomach turned to ice.

"—Josh dropped a hill on your parade, now Henri needs his diaper changed—"

Laughter rolled down from the walls, bright and mocking.

"—marched all week through mud and rain, and all you got was goblin stains—"

More voices joined, the chorus swelling until it echoed off the trees behind him.

"—came for glory, left with shame, Henri's balls will never be the same—"

He recognized the tune. The same cadence his scouts had reported from the hill fight, where Harold's people had collapsed the slope and gassed his soldiers. They'd been singing it then too, while his men choked and stumbled in the dark.

Now they were singing it at him. Singing about him.

Arjun's jaw tightened. "They knew we were coming. They had time to prepare songs."

Of course they did. Henri wanted to scream it. Of course they knew. They've known since before we left. Every step of this march was exactly what Harold wanted.

He stood at the edge of the tree line, mud ruining his boots, staring at the fort that should have been a refugee camp, listening to Harold's soldiers sing about stacking bodies, and something cold settled into his chest.

This wasn't going to be a raid.

This was going to be a siege.

And he didn't have the tools for it.

The song kept rolling down from the walls, cheerful and defiant and aimed directly at him. Henri's hands curled into fists at his sides, and he forced them to relax.

Fine.

Harold wanted to play games. Harold wanted to spend months building a fortress and filling it with soldiers and then laugh while Henri stared at it like a fool.

Fine.

Henri had resources Harold didn't know about. Arjun's wagons carried more than supplies. The men who couldn't march after the sleeping gas were still fighters once they recovered. And Harold's main army was in the north, a week, probably two away at minimum.

This wasn't the quick raid he'd planned. But it could still be a victory.

He just had to be smarter about it.

Henri turned to Arjun, his face composed into the mask he'd worn in boardrooms and ballrooms for twenty years before the world ended.

"Send runners back to the column. I want a full defensive camp established by nightfall. Earthworks, palisades, the works."

Arjun's eyes narrowed. "You want to settle in?"

"I'm adapting." Henri's voice was smooth again, controlled. "Harold can't reinforce this place without pulling troops from his northern campaign. If he does that, the monsters win. If he doesn't, we have time."

"Time for what?"

Henri looked back at the fort, at the walls he couldn't breach and the soldiers who stood behind them, singing.

"Time to find another way in."