B3Ch87- Battle of the Narrows (Patreon)

Literally spent all day on duty, working and editing on the book. Actually been a great day. Enjoy the chapters today, though. Working on getting into the Goblin City and ending that threat. ____

Mors threw his head up half a second before the mountain fell.

Harold felt the big horse lock up under him, and then he heard it, a crack high on the left wall of the valley. Snow and rock began to tumble down the mountain. Every head in the column turned up at once.

It came down a quarter mile ahead of the command group in a white wall. It swallowed the road and the frozen river beside it, along with most of a cohort from the Second Allied Legion, and the roar of it rolled back down the valley and thumped Harold in the chest. Snow smoke boiled off the slide. Then a second crack went off behind them, and Harold twisted in the saddle in time to watch another slope collapse over the tail of the column.

“Ah, shit,” Carter said.

Hale was up in his stirrups with the telescope already at his eye. “Horns. Ambush, front and rear. Sound it.”

The horns went up and down the column, and the ridges answered them. Drums started on both sides of the valley, hundreds of them, with the shriek of goblin war horns over the top, and the sky above the left ridge went dark with arrows.

“SHIELDS!”

Jack’s shield came up over Harold’s head, and the first volley hit it like hail on a tin roof. Mors snorted and sidestepped as a shaft stuck quivering in the snow by his hoof. All down the road the allied soldiers were dropping into turtles with a clatter, and a few of them were too slow. A man in the Second’s colors sat down in the snow with an arrow through his thigh and stared at it.

“Runner!” Hale lowered the telescope and swung around. “Second Corps holds its route and does not turn back, whatever they hear. Third and Fourth continue on schedule. Nobody comes to us. If they have this much force here, the other corps need to push. Go.”

The runner went at a sprint.

“Sir!” A signal officer was shouting up from the flag line, one hand clamped on his helmet. “Front’s reporting heavy infantry at the narrows! Hobgoblins, sir, a lot of them, and trolls behind! First Allied is falling back!”

“How far back?”

“They’re running, sir!”

Harold put the telescope to his own eye. Past the slide, the valley pinched down to a throat of rock where the road ran between the river and the cliff, and the First Allied Legion’s vanguard was coming apart in it. He watched one cohort’s standard tip over and disappear under a press of black iron, and the men around it broke for the rear in a spray of loose bodies. Their only way back was over the avalanche, and the snow in front of it was filling with men trying to climb it.

“The front’s going,” Harold said.

“I see it.”

“If the First breaks, they come back over that slide in a mob and pile into the rest of the corps, and those hobs follow them right in.”

“I know, Harold.”

“Sir!” Another voice, from the right this time. “Tunnels opening in the valley floor! Goblins coming up out of the ground, right in the middle of Third Allied!”

Hale’s jaw worked once. He looked at the river flats, where snow erupted in black holes, small shapes boiling out with spears and nets, and the Third Allied Legion bent around the eruptions.

“Mark’s people are with the Fourth Allied,” Hale said, low and fast, to nobody in particular. “Archers on the left ridge need clearing before they shred us. The rear—”

“Wargs on the baggage, sir! Rear guard’s engaged!”

“—the rear’s got wargs, of course it fucking does.” Hale turned to Harold. “Your Legion is three miles back with the Iron Order. Twenty minutes at a run, if the road’s clear.”

“Then I’ll buy the twenty minutes.”

Hale looked at him for a beat and let it go. “You’ll be at the point of a collapsing front with just your guard and whoever you can scrap together.”

“Better make sure you send the Legion running then.” Harold was already gathering the reins. “Get the Legion moving. You run the corps, and I’ll hold the front.”

“Don’t get dead,” Hale said, already turning to the flag line. 

Harold wheeled Mors around, and Adeline was at his stirrup.

She’d come up from the clerks’ wagons at a run, her fur coat open and the folio crushed against her chest, snow in her hair. Robin came a step behind her with his cleaver already in his hand.

“Harold—”

“You stay with Hale.” He leaned down out of the saddle. “Whatever happens up there, whatever you hear, you stay at his elbow, and you do what he tells you. Promise me.”

“I was going to tell you to be careful.”

“That too. Promise me first.”

Her mouth went tight. “I promise.”

He caught the back of her neck in his gloved hand and kissed her, and her fingers knotted in his cloak and held on a moment before she let him go.

“Robin.” Harold straightened. “Keep her here.”

The Redcap inclined his head. Then he flicked two fingers without looking, and the other Redcaps came away from the wagons. They were glamoured as men-at-arms, but they moved too smoothly for it, and they swung up onto horses and fell in at Mors’s flank.

“They ride with you, my lord,” Robin said. “I keep her.”

Harold nodded once and looked down the column. Sarah’s team was already mounted at the edge of the command group, and none of them looked like they were waiting for permission. Sarah had her sword across her saddle. Theo had his shield on his arm, and Mira was standing in her stirrups trying to see over the slide. Jace sat slumped as ever, and Robert was gripping the mane in both fists. Cassian sat a gray horse beside them with his spear across his back and an easy look on his face.

“We’re coming,” Sarah said.

“Didn’t figure I’d have to ask.” Harold put his heels to Mors. “Keep up!”

“I’m trying,” Robert said, as his horse took off after the others whether he liked it or not.

The avalanche was forty feet of broken snow, ice, and rock, and men were dying on it.

The First Allied’s rout had reached it before Harold did. Legionaries in blue and gray were trying to climb it with their shields slung, sliding, kicking, clawing at each other, and goblin skirmishers had gotten up on the cliff above and were throwing javelins down into them. A man near the top lost his footing and slid back down into the press with a javelin sticking out of his back.

Harold kept Mors at a full gallop. He poured mana down through his own body and into the horse, the way Fitch’s Tarantine’s did, and Mors went up the snow in four huge bounds, snow exploding under his hooves. The guard came up after him in a long ragged column, a hundred horses lunging up the face of the avalanche in a spray of snow, with Jack and Ren and Corwin at the front of it. The Redcaps took it without seeming to notice the slope at all. Mira’s horse went up in three bounds while she whooped the whole way, and Sarah and Theo and Jace scrambled after her. Robert’s horse planted all four feet at the bottom and refused. He bailed off it and came up the slide on foot, swearing a blue streak, with Cassian strolling beside him. The Gemheart guardians clambered up behind them, and Dorgan was bellowing curses in Dawi.

At the top, Harold pulled Mors up and looked down into the throat of the valley.

It was worse than it had looked through the glass.

The First Allied Legion was no longer a contiguous front. Clumps of men were still fighting in the narrows, backs to the cliff and the river, but most of them were running toward him, and behind them came the hobgoblins. They wore black iron from neck to knee and carried tower shields locked edge to edge, marching in step, with a drum beating time behind them. Three of the biggest trolls he had ever seen in iron collars came behind the shield wall like siege towers, chained and goaded by handlers with hooked poles. On the cliffs above, goblins were pouring arrows down into whatever stood still.

“Huh,” Jack said. “Time to go to work.”

“Thanks, Jack.”

The men on the slope below saw Harold’s banner, and a few of them slowed, and most kept running.

Harold let his aura go.

He released it across the valley floor like a hand coming down flat on a table, and he put his voice into it.

“STAND! We Stand and Fight!”

The running men stumbled, and several fell. The ones who’d been fighting with their backs to the cliff looked up. For a moment the whole valley seemed to hold its breath, even the hobgoblins’ drum skipping a beat, and in that moment Harold rode Mors down the near side and into the middle of the rout.

“You!” He leaned out of the saddle and caught a centurion by the harness strap, a gray-bearded man with blood down one side of his face and his sword still in his hand. “Who’s your commander?”

“Dead, my lord. Back there.” The man jerked his head at the narrows. “Took a troll’s chain to the head in the first minute.”

“Then you’re the commander now. Name?”

“Denholm, my lord.”

“Denholm, you’re going to form these men on me, right here at the foot of the slide. Three ranks across the road, river on the right and cliff on the left. Anybody who keeps running gets a sword in the back from you, and a worse one from me. Got it?”

Denholm stared at him. Then he nodded, swung around, and started bellowing, and he had a good voice for it.

“FORM ON THE COUNT! FORM ON THE BANNER, YOU USELESS BASTARDS! SHIELDS UP AND FACE FRONT! DORRIN, GET YOUR ARSE BACK HERE!”

The guard had come down the slide behind him and were already swinging out of their saddles, handlers grabbing reins and running the horses back up the slope. Harold swung off Mors and slapped his rump to send him after them, and Mors went without a fuss for once in his life. Harold drew the bastard sword.

“Wedge,” he said. “On me. We hit the front of that wall before it gets here and give these boys time to find their spines.”

“We’re going at them?” Elroy said.

“Glorious,” Jenkins breathed.

“Stupid,” Carter said. “Glorious and stupid. There must be over ten thousand of them marching at us.”

Jampa had his hands tucked into his sleeves, studying the hobgoblin line with polite interest. “Their drummer is very good,” he said. “Very steady. It’s a shame I will have to kill him.”

“Get in line, monk,” Dorgan growled, and spat on the snow. 

They went forward at a jog, a hundred men in a wedge at the point of a broken legion. They passed a dozen fights, and a few of his guard would break off, end the fight, and tell the survivors to form up. And the hobgoblin shield wall came on to meet them.

Harold hit it first.

He sank his aura and mana together into his body the way he had on the ledge, winding them through the braids in his muscle and bone and locking them there, and the world slowed down. He lit the blade as he came. Mana ran down the edge to the tip in a hard white shimmer, and behind him he heard the guard light theirs, a hundred blades going up at once with a sound like a sheet of glass being torn in half.

The bastard sword went through the center tower shield, through the arm behind it, and through the hobgoblin behind that, and the two halves of the shield fell into the snow on either side of him.

Then the guard hit the wall behind him like a fucking bomb.

Jack carved a hole on his left, wide enough to march a cart through. Ren swung at the next two shields at an angle and split them end to end. Carter roared and drove straight in after him, and the wedge went into the hobgoblin formation, splitting it open, mana blades rising and falling and the black iron coming apart under them in sprays of sparks and mana blades. Harold kept going and dragged the whole wedge with him, three ranks deep, five, seven, cutting toward the drum. The hobgoblins were big and well drilled and wore iron better than any goblin had a right to. But they were no match for the mana-wrought fury of the Empire's finest.

A shield edge slammed into his shoulder, and he rolled with it. Corwin’s spear came over his head and took the hobgoblin in the face. He swung again, clearing space around them as he swung through four different hobgoblins, and his guard abused the space he created to flow in and kill even more of them. All around them, the formation was folding inward, the ranks behind turning to face the hole and the ranks in front still trying to push toward the slide, and for a few heartbeats the whole iron mass of it was confused about which way it was supposed to go.

Harold felt it start to close around them.

“NOW!” he bellowed. “POTIONS! EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT!”

He ripped two vials off his bandolier and threw them sidearm, one left and one right, deep into the packed ranks. All around him the guard did the same, a hundred arms snapping out at once, and for a second the air over the hobgoblin formation was full of spinning glass.

The explosions came all at once, like a giant clapping his hands.

The blast threw Harold back a step and stole the world's sound. Through the ringing, he watched hobgoblins come apart, and the ones that held together were hurled aside in a dozen directions, tower shields tumbling end over end through the smoke like playing cards. The push toward the slide stopped dead. The drum skipped, stuttered, and lost the beat, and the formation scattered into a hundred knots of stunned, burning, bleeding hobgoblins with no idea which way was forward.

“OUT!” Harold was already turning. “Back to the line! Back on the First Allied, go!”

The guard went back out of the hole they’d cut the same way they’d gone in, fast and close, dragging their wounded. Behind them, past the smoke, Harold caught a glimpse of the avalanche. Denholm had the First Allied forming at the foot of it, men pouring off the snow into three crooked ranks while he walked up and down in front of them, kicking stragglers into place.

“LORD! LEFT!”

A troll was coming out of the smoke.

Its handlers were dead or gone, and the chain trailing from its collar was smoking and cracked; the explosions had driven it mad. It came through its own scattered line like a boulder downhill, flinging hobgoblins aside, and its fists were the size of a man’s chest. Dorgan met it head-on, alone, a short, wide shape against all that bulk.

“DEATH!”

His axe went into the troll’s knee and stayed there. The troll roared and kicked, and Dorgan went flying twenty feet, hit the snow rolling, and came up still roaring with no axe. The two Gemheart guardians went past him from either side and hit the troll’s other leg. It came down onto one knee, and Elroy was somehow on its back.

“I’M ON IT!” Elroy screamed.

Jenkins screamed and stabbed it in the ankle, his mana blade stalling against the troll's bones.

The troll reached back for Elroy, and Harold drove his blade up through the soft place under its jaw until the crossguard stopped him, and held it there while the troll thrashed and shuddered and died.

He pulled the blade free and looked back. Denholm had a line. It was three ranks deep and crooked as a dog’s hind leg, but the men in it were facing the right way, and there were more of them every second as the stragglers came off the slide.

On the right, where the line met the river, Sarah’s team had planted themselves at the end of it like a cork in a bottle. Theo held a hobgoblin’s shield with his own while Jace slipped under them both and opened the back of its knee, and when it fell, Robert’s axe came down and finished it with a crack of air behind the blow. Mira was up on a boulder behind them, putting arrows into the goblin archers on the cliff one after another. Every time one dropped, she shouted the count.

“FOURTEEN! Sarah, that’s fourteen!”

“I don’t care, Mira!” Somehow she was dancing gracefully around the arrows fired at her as if she knew where they were going to be.

“Fifteen!”

The hobgoblins re-formed behind their drum.

Harold felt the beat change, and the shield wall closed up, and on the cliffs above the archers started aiming at the guard. Corwin went down with a shaft through his calf, cursing. Ren dragged him back behind the line. The second troll was being goaded forward, and the third came behind it.

“Fall back to the line!” Harold shouted. “Back! On Denholm!”

The hobgoblins hit the front of Denholm’s line, and the line almost immediately broke.

It collapsed in the middle, where the First Allied’s men were still finding their feet. Harold watched a stretch of shields fold inward as the hobgoblin wall leaned on it, and then black iron was pouring through the gap.

“PLUG THAT HOLE!”

Ren got there first. He went into the breach shield-first, and a hobgoblin blade raked across his chest and skittered off the plate with a squeal. “SHIELDS ON ME! LOCK IT UP!” The guard poured in on either side of him, and their shields came together with a sound like a dropped anvil. All at once there was a wall of the Count’s men in the middle of the First Allied’s line, twenty wide and three deep, and the hobgoblins hit it and stopped.

Harold stood with them in the bend and fought.

“FIRST ALLIED!” He drove his aura down the line behind the words. “SHIELDS UP AND PUSH! PUSH, DAMN YOU!”

“PUSH!” Denholm took it up and roared it. “PUSH, YOU BASTARDS, OR WE ALL DIE, PUSH!”

The guard threw their weight into the shields, and the First Allied’s men threw theirs in behind, shoulders jammed into backs and boots digging trenches in the snow, and the whole line heaved. The hobgoblin wall went back one step, and then another, and then three more in a rush, and the men of the First Allied roared to feel it give.

That was when the goblins came.

There’d been hundreds of them waiting behind the hobgoblin ranks, small and fast and wrapped in rags and bone, and the moment the wall gave ground they came through it. They slid under the shields on their bellies with knives, slashing at ankles and hamstrings. They hooked the shield rims with long iron crooks and hauled them down so the spears behind could stab over the top. They ran up the hobgoblins’ backs and leaped clean over the front rank, and came down screaming into the second. A legionary on Harold’s left went down with three of them clinging to his back and never got up. Another had his shield torn out of his hands by a crook and took a spear in the belly before he could reach for his sword. Everywhere the First Allied had pushed hardest, the goblins were among them, stabbing and biting and stabbing again, and the push turned into a slaughter.

“Fucking hell,” Carter said, and opened a goblin from collarbone to hip as it came down over his shield.

“SECOND RANK UP!” Ren bellowed. “KILL WHAT COMES OVER! FRONT RANK, HOLD!”

A knight beside Harold carried an axe with winter inlaid into it. He swung it at a goblin in mid-leap, and frost feathered off the edge and hung in the air in a glittering line behind the stroke. The next two goblins jumped straight through it and came down with lines on their body frozen stiff, and they shattered on the snow like dropped crockery. Another knight fed mana into his spear, and it lit with flames. He swept it low along the foot of the shields, and the goblins crawling underneath screamed and burned. Further down, a pair of knights carried blades that woke with life mana. With every cut they made, the men holding them stood straighter while the gashes on their own arms knitted shut. A hobgoblin’s mana-lit cleaver came down on one knight’s helm and deflected off it while he swung back and took the hobgoblin's head.

Harold quit rationing his mana. He’d been husbanding his mana since the slide, and now he let it go. He poured it into the bastard sword until the white edge ran a full arm’s length past the end of his sword, and he swung it in a long flat arc over the top of the shield wall. It went through everything in front of him at chest height. Goblins coming over the shields fell in pieces, and the hobgoblin behind them lost his shield and his head in the same stroke. Harold swung back the other way and did it again, and again, sweeping the front of the line like a scythe through standing wheat. Men of the First Allied stopped fighting just to stare at him.

“Gods, he’s not human,” someone said.

“He’s the fucking Count!” Carter snapped. “Eyes front! KILL!”

Then the big ones came.

Harold felt them before he saw them, auras rising out of the hobgoblin mass like heat off a forge. A hobgoblin champion shouldered through its own ranks, a head taller than the rest, in black plate with a greatsword over one shoulder and a red aura pouring off it so thick the snow steamed under its boots. On a spur of rock to the right, two goblin shamans in antler headdresses had started to chant. The wind over the First Allied’s right flank turned sour and gray, and the men under it began to cough and stagger. And out of a gully at the cliff foot came a pack of berserkers in bone masks, thirty of them, with foam on their lips, running flat out for the thinnest stretch of Denholm’s line.

The First Allied wouldn’t stand against any of it. They were barely standing as it was, and back across the slide, Harold could hear the Second Allied still locked in its own fight with whatever had come down on it. Help wasn’t coming from that side.

He started handing out problems.

“JACK! The big one!”

Jack was already moving. He went through the hobgoblin line like it was a bead curtain, and the champion’s red aura slammed down on him, and Jack’s own came up to meet it. They hit each other like two rams in rut, and the shock of it knocked men off their feet yards away.

“SARAH! Shamans, on the rock, right side!”

“Going!” Sarah’s team was off along the riverbank at a run, Theo out front with his shield up blocking the gray wind, Mira loosing arrows from the hip as she ran, and Robert bulling along behind them with his axe already crackling. They had their best chance with their regeneration.

“CARTER! Take twenty and kill those berserkers before they reach the line!”

Carter looked at the pack. “Twenty. Generous, my lord.”

“And take Elroy and Jenkins.”

“Oh, come on—”

“BERSERKERS!” Elroy was already running. “WE’LL SHOW ’EM WHAT CRAZY LOOKS LIKE!”

Carter swore, waved his twenty after them, and went.

“REN! We stand here! Nothing gets through! Raise the banner! FOR THE EMPIRE!”

Harold stayed in the bend and swept his blade along the front of the shields as he tried to rally the First Allied. 

Out past the hobgoblins, Jack and the champion were trading blows that rang off the cliff like a smithy. On the right, Theo’s shield took a hex square on its face and smoked, and Cassian came past him in one of those ugly burst-steps, up the spur of rock. The nearer shaman turned toward him and took one of Mira’s arrows through the eye instead. The gray wind blasted into Cassian, sending him reeling before the arrow exploded in the shaman's head.

“SIXTEEN!” Mira screamed.

At the cliff foot, Carter’s twenty met the berserkers head-on. A fire spear went through two of them at once, and the frost axe hung its glittering line across the gap. Elroy and Jenkins went into the thick of the pack back to back, howling louder than the berserkers were as they danced among them.

A boy beside Harold in the second rank took a spear in the throat, and the man behind him stepped up into the gap. A volley came down off the cliff straight at the bend, and Cassian, back from the rock, stepped forward and threw up his free hand, and a dome of dark, oily light bloomed over the guard. The arrows hit it and slid off like rain off a waxed tarp.

“You’re welcome,” Cassian said, and stabbed a hobgoblin through the visor.

On the left, the hobgoblins had started pressing hard at the cliff end of the line, and the Redcaps were gone. He saw the pressure on the left ease, and then stop, and then the screams of terror started somewhere inside the hobgoblin formation. When the Redcaps came back to the line a minute later, glamoured and quiet, their caps were dripping red.

The second troll smashed through four men on the left before Jampa walked up to it, set his palm flat against its kneecap, and did something that folded the knee backward with a crack Harold heard over everything else. The ascetic monks' power was terrifying. They could manipulate the pain inside a living thing, and Jampa had taken the troll’s emotional pain and turned it into physical pain in its kneecap. No method Harold knew could defend against it.

Out past the shields, Jack put his blade through the champion’s visor, and the red aura went out like a snuffed candle.

Somewhere during the fight, Harold realized the steady drum behind the hobgoblin line had gone silent. He looked up and saw Jampa standing on the far side of the enemy line beside the broken drum, alone, wiping his hands on his robe.

“You’re insane!” Harold shouted from where he stood in the shield wall when the monk had worked his way back.

The healing potions ran out a little after that. Harold felt for the last vial on his bandolier, found a broken one with glass in his gloves, and shook it off. They were wounded multiple times. Members of his guard had fallen even as kitted out as they were. There were just too many. His aura was guttering. Every time he pushed it out to steady the line, it was a little less effective.

Carter came back along the line with fourteen of his twenty, his shield split down the middle and held together by the strap. Elroy and Jenkins were behind him, both bloody to the elbows and both grinning like idiots.

“How long?” Carter panted. “How long since we came over?”

“Fifteen minutes. Maybe.”

“Feels like a fucking week.”

The third troll was coming, and the hobgoblins had found a second wind behind it, and the line was bending again, and he could feel it about to go. He set his feet and pushed!

Then, faintly behind them, someone started to sing.

At first, he thought it was the wind coming off the mountain. Then it grew louder, a deep, rolling noise rising up the valley.

“Goblin, goblin, in the snow!”

“WHERE YOU RUNNING? NOWHERE TO GO!”

“Got my shield and got my spear!”

Carter started to laugh, a cracked, half-crazed sound. “YES! You’re all fucked now!”

“Parker’s in the front with his sword held high!”

“PARKER’S GOT A SHIT-STAINED—”

“THAT WILL DO, LEGION!” Parker’s voice cut across the top of the singing like a whip, and ten thousand men roared with laughter at once, and then the crest of the avalanche was full of them.

The Legion came over the top in a wave.

The crafters had gone ahead of them and cut steps into the rock, and the Legion came down those steps a cohort at a time, shields locked and spears up, never breaking stride. They reached the valley floor behind Denholm’s line and pushed through it, and the men of the First Allied, who had been on the edge of breaking for the second time that day, watched them go by with their mouths hanging open.

“JAVELINS!”

The volley went over the line in a flat black sheet and hit the hobgoblin wall at fifteen paces. It punched through the tower shields and the iron behind them and the hobgoblins behind that, and the front of the wall came apart. The third troll took six javelins in the chest and sat down hard. Into the gap came the pikes, three ranks deep, then the swords of the Legion behind them, and the Legion went into the hobgoblin formation like a fist.

Harold let himself sag against Carter.

“Show-offs,” Carter said fondly.

It took another hour to break the goblins. 

The hobgoblins fell back into the narrows and tried to hold there, and the Legion pinned them in place while the Iron Order came up the valley road and went straight on past toward the rear. Harold heard later that they’d hit the wargs at the baggage from the flank while the riders were still busy looting, and that most of the wargs never made it back to their side valley. Mark’s adventurers went up the left ridge in a dozen small teams, and Harold watched the arrows from the cliff thin out and then stop as the teams took the archers’ positions one by one. Out on the river flats, the crafters went from tunnel to tunnel with the Third Allied guarding them, collapsing each one, and every time one fell in, a cheer went up from the men around it.

Slowly, Hale’s flags pulled the corps back together.

Harold could see it happening from the foot of the slide. The Third Allied straightened its line across the flats. The Second dug itself out of the snow and came up on the Third’s flank. The Legion held the narrows, and the remnants of the First Allied were pulled back behind them to be counted and fed. By the time the light started to go, there was one continuous front across the valley from cliff to river. The goblins tested it twice more before dark, the second time with a rush of wolf riders down the right slope, and both times they broke on it and went back into the rocks.

Harold found Denholm sitting on an upturned shield behind the Legion’s line, letting a medic stitch his scalp, while what was left of the First’s officers did the count.

“How bad?” Harold asked.

Denholm looked up at him, and the old centurion’s face was gray under the blood.

“We marched out of the goblin town forty-three hundred strong, my lord. They’re still counting.” He swallowed. “It’s going to be under two thousand.”

Harold nodded. He stood there a moment longer, then put a hand on the man’s shoulder and squeezed once.

“You held,” he said. “When it counted, you held. I’ll make sure Colonel Hale knows it.”

Denholm looked away up the slide and kept his mouth shut.

Harold walked back through the camp as the fires came up. The guard trailed behind him, quiet now. Corwin was being carried on a litter, swearing steadily at the men carrying him. Elroy and Jenkins each had a troll tooth and argued over whose was bigger, and Dorgan walked in a slow, careful line with his ribs strapped, carrying his recovered axe like a baby.

Hale was waiting for him at the edge of the command group with two cups of coffee in his hands. He held one out.

Harold took it, and they stood side by side looking out at the valley, the fires of the corps running up it in a long crooked line toward the narrows.

“Four days,” Hale said finally. “That’s four days we’ll be stuck in this valley clearing the narrows and digging out the road. The crafters are exhausted. The men are exhausted. We have ten legions here, and four of them got punished hard today.”

Harold drank his coffee. It was terrible, but he drank all of it.

“Map table,” he said. “Now. Bring Maren.”