“Sergeant Coldwell. Pell Dunwick. Jak Fenn. Edrin Hale. Two road hands absent. Two sent to the south wall.”
The gate crier’s last count followed us beyond Marchgate’s palisade. Four names for an eastern road carrying three wagons, two merchants, and a family with children.
At my name, the lead carter looked back. His gaze found Duskfang, then the child on his wagon. I turned the scabbard behind my thigh so the pommel wouldn’t knock her boot if the cart stopped short. She waved at Pell.
Jak ranged ahead where young birches narrowed the road, his mismatched leathers breaking up his shape in the brush. He stopped often to read the ditches and the empty ground between trees.
Tamsin kept me several strides behind her, Pell with the wagons. I’d agreed to her terms: on her road, her voice. My healed right hand hung easy at my side. Yesterday’s bruise knocked once at my hip on the steeper rise and settled.
“Keep your ground clear,” Tamsin said. “If I stop, you stop. If I leave the road, follow my feet.”
“Not my curiosity.”
“Especially not that.”
“Pell,” she called without turning. “Bring the rear cart closer, but leave room to turn it. If we leave the road, nobody bunches at the ditch.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
His boots quickened. A moment later, the cart creaked forward, and the child riding atop it waved at him as though he’d been assigned to make the journey more interesting.
The road climbed through a patch of fresh spring mud. Wheel ruts crossed one another, but the newest tracks stopped abruptly where the brush had been cut back. Several branches lay half buried along the verge. Not storm-fallen. Laid there.
Jak returned from ahead, moving quickly now. His squint sharpened in the full sun as he pointed with two fingers toward the bend.
“The mud continues past the rise,” he said. “The brush doesn’t. Someone cleared a view, then spoiled the road afterward.”
Tamsin halted us with one raised fist. The wagons groaned behind her and stopped in stages.
She studied the broken branches, then shifted to the road’s edge, careful not to step into the darkest rut.
“Jak, take the left verge and look for fresh cuts. Pell, keep the carts where they are. Nobody crosses the ditch until I say so.”
Her hand settled near her sword, not drawing it. I stayed where she’d placed me, though every instinct in me wanted to earn the trust attached to steel.
Tamsin crouched beside the altered ground. The morning light showed a shallow groove beneath the mud, too straight for a wagon wheel.
“This wasn’t damage,” she said. “It was preparation.”
Jak moved in a crouch along the verge, his mismatched leathers darkened by damp grass. He pressed two fingers into a patch of bent stems, then lifted them to show the mud clinging beneath his nails.
“Someone walked here after the rain,” he said. “Then brushed the grass upright again.”
He followed the line toward the alder trees, pausing where a length of cord had been cut cleanly through. The loose end still hung from a thorn, its fibers pale and fresh. Jak tugged it once, gently, and the brush shifted enough to reveal a narrow view of the wagons.
“A hitching line,” Pell said. “For the cart?”
“Could’ve caught a wheel.” Jak glanced toward the bend. “Could’ve pulled a horse sideways. But it isn’t set to hold anything now.”
I studied the marks he’d uncovered. “Then it was a retreat route. They spoiled the road, cut the line, and left themselves a clean way out.”
Jak’s eyes narrowed against the sun. He moved another few paces and scraped mud from a shallow boot impression with the edge of his knife.
“No,” he said. “If they wanted out, they’d keep the path hidden. Look here.”
He pointed from one gap in the alder growth to the next. Each opening gave a clear view of the road, then vanished behind branches. The spaces were nearly even, though the ground between them twisted around the drainage ditch.
“A watcher stood at each one,” Jak continued. “Beyond speaking range. Near enough to see when the carts stopped, when the soldiers turned, when someone ran for the gate.”
My first answer had felt pleasingly complete. It collapsed under his boot.
“They’re measuring the response,” I said.
“That’s closer.” He glanced back at me. “Not just the response. The time between it. Who moves first. Who leaves a gap.”
Behind us, a carter whispered something sharp to his team. One of the two travelers beside the rear wagon gripped a child’s shoulder, while the other kept staring toward the brush as if fear alone might make it part.
Tamsin rose and pointed toward the low drainage wall running beside the bend. “Pell, bring the rear cart behind the stone. Slow and straight. Carter, keep the team’s heads forward. Travelers stay with the wheels.”
Pell hurried back. His armor knocked softly with each step, and he gave the nearest traveler a broad, earnest nod that seemed to steady the man more than any speech could’ve done.
Far beyond the bend, Marchgate’s eastern gate showed between the trees. Defenders moved along the wall in small knots, some carrying bows, others hauling shields from a yard crowded with wagons. A horn sounded from that direction, answered by a thinner note farther along the road. Too many places needed watching. Too few people stood watch.
Tamsin came to me while the carts rolled into place. She shifted my shoulder a fraction away from the ditch, then pointed with two fingers.
“You take the left side. Stay between the wall and the alder gap. If you hear trouble behind you, hold until Pell calls. If you see movement here, call me. You don’t cross the carts. You don’t extend past the trees.”
“What if the trees offend me personally?”
“Endure it.”
My fingers found the sword’s hilt and stayed there. The grip held. So did I.
“And if the attackers divide themselves with perfect courtesy?”
“Then you’ll have a quiet morning.”
Jak settled behind the wall with his crossbow ready, watching the next opening instead of the first. Tamsin took the center. I stepped into the left side, boots sinking slightly into the soft verge, and kept Duskfang sheathed while the frightened travelers pressed close to the cart.
The first arrow struck the lead animal high in the shoulder. It screamed and reared, harness straps snapping tight. A second shaft cut the traces, and the beast lurched sideways, dragging the forward cart toward the ditch.
“Pell, behind the stone. Get the travelers down. Jak, high brush, left of the split oak.” Tamsin pointed with her sword. “Loose only when you see them. Edrin, hold your ground. Don’t chase past the alder.”
Another arrow rattled against the cart. Pell threw himself between the wheels and the nearest traveler, his ill-fitting mail clanging as he hauled a woman down by the arm. The frightened animal kicked through the traces. The smell of torn leather and hot horse filled my mouth.
Jak rose barely above the drainage stone to fire. His crossbow snapped, and a small green-grey figure in patched leather folded behind the brush. One pointed ear showed through the leaves. “One down.”
Seven more goblins broke from cover behind the one Jak had dropped, low and wiry, yellow-eyed beneath scraps of green-brown leather. They moved together, not like scavengers surprised into violence, but like fighters who had rehearsed where every frightened body would run. Two angled toward the carts. One came straight for me with a short sword low at his thigh. The remaining four held the brush and high ground.
My right hand closed around Duskfang, and the grip was whole, and some week-old part of me still expected it not to be. For one hot heartbeat I saw myself breaking Tamsin’s line, taking all three in the open, and returning before anyone could object. It was a magnificent picture. It was also stupid. Pell could die inside it.
I drew.
The pact came with the motion. No prayer. No bargaining. It was simply there when I reached for it, and Duskfang darkened in my hand. Its edge gained a weight the eye couldn’t measure, as if the blade had remembered a deeper country.
I called the dark edge Nightblade. The name had stuck.
I took the goblin in my ground first.
The goblin lunged. He was quick. The power in my blade made quick look terribly ordinary. Steel scraped once as I turned his sword aside, then I cut across his forearm with a motion scarcely larger than a correction. The dark edge went through his leather guard. His sword fell. He stumbled after it, staring at the blood brightening his sleeve.
“Stay down,” I told him, though he reached for a knife.
He didn't listen. He came again.
Tamsin reached the cart before the other two attackers did. Her longsword caught one goblin’s strike, then her stance changed beneath him. She’d seen the blow before his shoulder finished turning. A step, a twist, and her hilt drove into his mouth. He fell against the wheel. The second raider tried to pass her, and she broke his knee with a low cut.
Jak fired from behind the drainage stone. His shaft struck the hand of the goblin Tamsin had knocked against the wheel as it reached through the spokes. The attacker screamed and dragged himself behind the cart. Pell kept the travelers pressed low, shortsword raised in both hands while his eyes jumped from the road to the ditch and back again.
The goblin before me recovered his knife. He saw me waiting and mistook stillness for hesitation. The pact-weight sat cleanly behind Duskfang’s edge, immense and obedient. He stepped into reach.
I let him.
When he crossed the edge of my ground, I turned on my heel and cut beneath his ribs. The force went through him the way an axe goes through green wood, a wet crunch I felt in my elbow and knew I’d keep feeling after, and the knife left his hand, and he folded into the grass and stopped being a fighter and became a weight.
The child on the rear cart had turned around.
She was perhaps six, and her mother had her head against one shoulder to keep her from seeing the road, and she’d got loose of the restraining hand. She wasn’t looking at the goblins at all. She was looking at me, and at the dark thing running down my blade, and her mouth had come open. She had the face of a child watching a storm come in over open water. Not running from it. Not able to look at anything else.
Her mother pulled her back down. The girl kept her eyes on me the whole way.
Beyond her, two of the goblins who’d held the brush rushed the open road, and a horn sounded three descending notes from somewhere past the bend.
Jak's head snapped toward the trees. “That's a signal. Not a retreat.”
Tamsin shoved the wounded attacker away from the wheel and raised her sword. “Pell, keep them down. Jak, watch the rear. Edrin, left side. Hold.”
More brush moved beyond the alder gap. My pulse kicked so hard it shook Duskfang’s point. The power didn’t shake at all. I kept the blade low while the remaining raiders closed on the carts.
The first of those two raiders reached us with a round shield raised. Tamsin stepped into the space between us before I could meet him, her longsword catching his strike high. She watched his shoulder, not his face. When his weight committed, she drove through the opening with a hard, straight cut that split the shield rim and sent him sprawling beside the ditch.
“Left side,” she called. “Edrin, the next one is yours. Keep him off the cart.”
The second came low, a hide-wrapped shield tucked tight against his ribs. Nightblade hadn’t left the steel since I drew it. It didn’t gutter between men and it didn’t need asking twice, and I was starting to understand it’d sit there as long as I wanted it there.
A shield is a door, Kade used to say, and doors have hinges. This one was lashed to the forearm with three turns of wet cord, and the third turn showed above the rim every time the goblin brought it up. So I let him bring it up. The cut travelled about a handspan, the length of a correction rather than a blow, and it took the cord and most of the arm beneath it. The shield went one way and the goblin went the other, and his guard stopped existing, because I hadn’t broken it. I’d untied it.
He twisted toward the nearest cart with the ruined arm swinging. His breastplate was scrap, cut down from something bigger and riveted where the plates hadn’t wanted to meet, and the seam ran under his left arm in a line a blind man could’ve found. I crossed the few feet he’d surrendered and put the dark edge into it. The pact did the rest. It went in the way a key goes in, and what came apart on the far side stopped being a shape worth describing, and my arm rang to the shoulder with what the blade had just spent.
“Hold there,” Tamsin said.
I stopped with the next step still hot in my legs. “There’s a great deal of road left.”
“And none of it belongs to you.”
Jak's crossbow snapped from behind the drainage stone. A goblin archer on the low rise jerked his wounded arm back, his bow falling into the grass. Jak reloaded without looking down. “High ground suppressed. Two moving right. Tamsin, they're trying the rear cart.”
“Pell, turn them.”
Pell planted himself between the travelers and the road, shortsword held in both hands. A woman dragged a child beneath the wagon while he caught a thrown knife on his blade. The impact knocked him sideways, but he recovered and shoved the weapon into the dirt.
“Stay low!” he shouted. “Nobody runs until she says.”
The raider Tamsin had felled tried to rise. She crossed the distance before he found his knees, struck his wrist, and kicked his sword away. Her next cut ended the struggle. No flourish. She simply finished it.
The two covering raiders saw the bodies and stopped. One lifted his horn. Jak fired. The shaft struck his forearm, and the horn fell into the mud.
Three descending notes sounded again from beyond the bend.
“They're pulling out,” Jak said. “Not fleeing. Count the gaps.”
Tamsin's blade pointed once toward the retreating goblins. “Let them go. Pell, hold the travelers. Jak, cover the road. Edrin, stay where you are.”
I stayed. Nobody broke after them. The goblin Tamsin had smashed against the wheel dragged his wounded hand free and joined the two covering raiders. Together they hauled the knee-broken fighter into the alder trees. Four survivors, none abandoned. Four others lay still among the grass, the ditch, and the shattered wheel.
The horse kept screaming behind the carts. Blood ran into the wheel ruts. My hand began shaking only after I counted four bodies that weren’t getting up.
The travelers came out from under the carts, and every one of them did the same small thing: find the bodies, find the blood, find me, and then arrange themselves so that I wasn't the nearest person to them.
It was done politely, which was the part I hadn't expected. A man chose the far side of his own wagon. A woman turned her shoulder half a degree. The space around me stayed wider than the space around Pell, who'd spent the morning lying on strangers and shouting at them to stay down.
They're alive to do that.
I know.
You wanted me to say something kinder. I don't have one that's also true.
Tamsin looked from the dead in my ground to Duskfang's plain steel.
“You held,” she said. “Now don't move until I tell you.”
The raiders withdrew so neatly that the road seemed to exhale behind them. I kept Duskfang low and looked toward the bend.
“Can I move now?”
“Three steps. No more.”
“A generous woman.”
Her eyes stayed on the road. “Four steps, and I’ll have Pell carry you.”
Pell shifted nearer with his shortsword ready, eager to obey and visibly uncertain whether he should look pleased by the assignment. “I can carry him.”
“I know,” Tamsin said. “You won’t unless I order it.”
Beyond the alder bend, the road climbed toward a bare-backed ridge. Four figures moved along its lower slope. The goblin with the ruined knee hung between two companions; the fourth walked backward with a bow raised toward us. One carrier stopped beside a thorn thicket and reached into the brush.
“There,” Jak said.
He pointed with his crossbow, not his hand. A strip of red cloth vanished from the branches. The raider tucked it away and resumed the climb.
My body leaned toward the ridge before I gave it permission. The leader was there, too small for a face, compact beneath a dark coat with a red cord at one shoulder. He lifted one arm. The retreating goblins folded around the wounded and kept their bows facing backward.
Jak squinted toward him. “Hesh.”
“You know him?”
“Road crews do. Dark coat. Red cord. Three notes.”
The name settled badly in my stomach. I wanted the distance gone. I wanted to put Duskfang under the commander’s ribs and ask what he’d learned from our blood. Instead, Tamsin caught my sleeve with two fingers.
“No pursuit.”
“He’s in reach of a good runner.”
“You aren’t leaving your ground to give him the lesson he came to measure.”
“That’s extremely inconvenient.”
“Complain on the walk back.”
Three notes descended from the ridge. The same call I’d heard before. The sound traveled cleanly over the grass, and every goblin answered it with movement. The rear guard lowered his bow. The two carriers lifted the knee-broken goblin higher. Hesh gave one brief gesture, then disappeared beyond the rise.
Jak crouched beside the ditch, studying the churned mud. “They waited until we formed. Tested the cart line. Pulled the horn when our wounded were still being counted.” He glanced toward the ridge, then hooked one finger through a barbed iron lying beside the sprung cord. A matching hook had bitten into the forward cart’s axle.
“They weren’t trying to break through. They wanted the time between the first arrow and our first proper line.”
“Marchgate’s response,” Tamsin said.
“How fast the road party gets covered. Who shifts first. Which gap opens when someone falls.” Jak’s mouth tightened. “Then they left before we could make them pay for asking.”
I looked toward the empty ridge. Chasing him might’ve been the answer he came to collect. The thought tasted worse than the blood at the back of my throat.
“We gather what they left,” Tamsin said. “Pell, bodies and bows. Jak, the brush and ditch. Edrin, stay with me and mark anything useful.”
She led me only as far as the nearest fallen goblin. My boots sank into the torn verge. The goblin’s bow had split at the grip, but his knife remained sound, along with a coil of cord, a waterskin, and a pouch of iron arrowheads. Pell recovered the other bows, testing each string before setting the usable ones beside the carts. I passed him the first knife. He took two more sound ones from the dead and laid all three beside the bows. Jak found the red cord caught under a root, then followed the churned marks to the horn lying in the mud.
He lifted it by the cord. Bone, short and polished from handling. The three holes were dark with wet soil.
“Don’t sound it,” I said.
Jak looked at me and clicked his tongue once. “I wasn’t planning to invite them back.”
Tamsin took the horn and wrapped it in a dead goblin’s torn cloak. “We return together. No one follows the ridge.”
I wanted to argue. Instead, I bent and picked up the bundle of usable arrows.
The carter was nearest, and arrows are a carter's business as much as anyone's, so I held them out to him.
He looked at the arrows, then at my hand around them, and his face rearranged itself into a shape he plainly had no practice making.
“Put them in the cart, sir.”
He had thirty years on me and he called me sir, and then he went to check a wheel so he had somewhere else to put his eyes.
I put them in the cart.
Pell came past with a recovered bow and didn't make it strange, which I appreciated more than I could've said out loud. “He's Tannel. He talks to his mule more than he talks to people. Don't take it personal.”
“I won't.”
“You will.” He said it without any edge at all, and went to stack the bows.
Perhaps Hesh had wanted to see which order I'd break. If so, he could go east wondering. It was easier to think about Hesh than about a man who called me sir with a wagon between us.
The carts creaked into motion behind us, their wheels complaining at every rut. I kept the arrows tucked against my left hip while the road party gathered itself into a slower shape, wounded travelers inside the wagons, armed hands walking on either side. The afternoon sun had begun to soften, turning the wet wheel tracks bright as hammered brass.
Tamsin moved along the line, checking faces, harness, and the distance between each guard. She stopped beside Pell and held out the wrapped horn.
“Carry it. Keep it tied. Don’t sound it.”
Pell took the bundle with both hands. “What if someone asks for it?”
“They ask me.”
Jak glanced at him. “Don’t lose it.”
“What happens if I do?”
“We lose it.”
Pell considered that, then tucked the horn more securely under his arm. Jak went back to watching the ditch.
Jak came alongside Pell. Pell held the bundle out without letting go while Jak loosened the cloak around the horn and drew the red cord free. Mud had stiffened it, but the fibers beneath were clean and tightly twisted. Jak rubbed them between finger and thumb, then held the cord near the horn’s polished rim.
“Same handling,” he said. “See the shine here? The cord’s been pulled through this groove often. Not decoration.”
“A bell line,” Tamsin said.
“Maybe. It could’ve marked a runner, a meeting point, anything. The horn tells us they worked to a signal. It doesn’t tell us who gave the signal, or how much of the road they’ve watched.”
He wrapped the cord again. His eyes kept traveling over the ditches and the rising ground, never resting long enough to admire anything. I wanted a clean answer from the mud, preferably one that pointed at a single villain and came with a convenient handle. Instead, the road offered only crushed grass, wagon scars, and a few black feathers turning in the wind.
Duskfang rode at my left side. Its steel looked exactly as it’d before the fight, dark and plain beneath the fading light. No strange sheen marked it now. No stain clung to the edge. What unsettled me was how little the power had asked. Nothing. The Flood had left me ruined; this had felt as natural as closing my fist. Relief should’ve been the whole of it. The hunger underneath was harder to admit.
You wanted more.
I didn’t answer her, because the answer was yes, and because a girl on a cart had looked at me the way people look at weather, and a carter thirty years older had called me sir and then found a wheel to study. I hadn’t frightened them. I had turned into something they had no ordinary way of standing next to, which isn’t the same thing and might be worse.
Marchgate appeared beyond the next long slope, its walls catching the sun in pale strips between watchtowers. A bell rang from the western wall. Another answered near the road gate, then a third farther inside the town.
The travelers stiffened. Workers beside the road didn’t. A woman sweeping grain husks from a stall pulled her child closer, then continued. Two masons lowered a length of timber and looked toward the wall. A teamster cursed at his mule, hurried it beneath the gate arch, and waved the cart behind him through.
At the gate, one crew shifted from the outer platform to the roadhouse while a repairer with lime on his sleeves pointed toward the bells.
“Wall bell means trouble on the north face,” he called. “Gate bell means traffic warning. The inner one means someone’s still deciding which trouble matters most.”
Tamsin watched the crews separate, her hand resting near her sword. “Keep moving. Pell, stay with the horn. Jak, rear ground. Edrin, inside the carts.”
My first impulse was to look toward the ditch. Then I stepped where she’d placed me, arrows held against my side, and entered Marchgate with the patrol around me instead of ahead of me.
You see Marchgate differently coming back to it than you do walking up to it the first time.
The first time it’d been a line across the country and I’d stood there counting towers. Coming home off the eastern road with four dead goblins behind us, I looked at the same wall and thought instead about how much of it there was. Four hundred feet on the eastern face alone, and that was one face of four, and the eight we’d fought that afternoon had felt like a great many at the time and would’ve looked, against that stone, like a work party sent out to clear a ditch.
Dain Carver came out from beneath the gate arch with a strip of timber on one shoulder.
“Shelter the travelers,” he called. “Carts clear of the wall. Leave room for the brace.”
Workers moved before he reached us. One took the lead horse. Another guided the family toward the roadhouse. Above, a crew hauled a replacement beam into position while two men argued about the angle without pausing their ropes.
Dain looked at Tamsin. “Report.”
“Eight raiders. Four dead, four withdrew on three notes. Hesh led. We recovered the horn, red cord, two bows, three knives, and the hooked irons from the carts.”
Pell held out the wrapped horn.
“Keep it with her,” Dain said. He shifted the timber. “Travelers inside. Patrol to Aldara when the gate is set.”
Jak stood near the inner postern, still watching the road.
“They came to count us,” he said.
Tamsin nodded. “They did. Aldara’s orders stay in force: nobody rides east alone, every watch learns those three notes before dark, and we vary the patrol hours.”
Dain passed the orders to the gate crew. The wall bell gave one heavy note, and he turned toward it at once.
“North face holds,” he called. “Gate crew here. Western watch takes traffic. If the inner bell rings twice, close the passage.”
He carried the timber to the waiting brace.
Tamsin’s eyes went to Duskfang. “Three came into your ground. None reached the cart. You stopped when ordered.”
“Any faults?”
“Your second recovery was late.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“Tomorrow.”
The people from the road moved through the yard without looking at me for long. The carter stayed on the far side of his wagon. The child held his mother’s skirt and watched my sword.
“They’re frightened,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I saved them.”
“You did. They’re frightened anyway.” Tamsin took the horn from Pell.
The child leaned around her mother. “Does your sword bite?”
“Only when I tell it to.”
Her mother pulled her closer. In my head, that had sounded reassuring.
I wiped Duskfang with a strip from the ruined harness, careful not to touch the edge. The child watched every pass. When the black blade slid into its sheath, the carter’s shoulders lowered.
Pell’s hand stayed curved around the shape of the horn after he’d given it up. He shook his fingers out and reached for the recovered bows instead. The color hadn’t returned to his face, either.
One of the workers signaled. Dain and three others shoved the new timber home. The gate shuddered, dropped dust, and held.
“Wall shelter tonight,” Tamsin said to me. “I’m asking.”
“I’ll be there.”
She moved toward the commandant’s house with Jak and Pell.
I followed her under the arch, and the next watch went up the stair past us on the other side: forty of them in file, nobody told twice, and behind them the rest of the evening’s muster crossing the yard toward the northern span with their bows still cased. Marchgate has put something over a hundred people onto its walls every night of the year for ninety years. Most of those nights nothing comes out of the east at all, and the ones on the wall stand their watch and go down again and grumble about the cold, and that’s what a wall is for.
The three-note horn stayed silent beneath her arm.