17. Sabine
SABINE
"Crane crew, I need that second beam braced before the next rotation!" Velka shouts from somewhere to my left, her voice carrying over the ring of axes like she was born giving orders in a forest. Maybe she was.
I mark another section on the rough map spread across the supply crate and call across to the group of blacksmiths from the valley who are shoulder-to-shoulder with a pair of Ashwing gargoyles twice their size.
"The deadfall line needs to run further east. If Tharros's scouts use the same ridge approach from last time, we want them hitting the trigger before they have eyes on the tent line. "
The older blacksmith, Henrek, squints at me. Three weeks ago he would have sooner spat at my boots than take direction from a gravekeeper girl. Now he just nods and relays the instruction without comment.
Progress, I think. Ugly, grudging, life-threatening progress. But still.
The camp sprawls through the mountain woods in organized chaos — eleven days into the siege now and it shows: canvas tent scattered everywhere, cook fires snapping in stone-ringed pits, and gargoyles crouched low along the high ridgeline in rotating patrol formations that Tovian personally set before dawn.
I watched him do it. Watched him assign each patrol with the efficiency of a commander who has been winning territorial wars since before my grandmother's grandmother was born. No wasted words. No ceremony. Just a pointed finger and a look that nobody in their right mind argues with.
Nobody except me. And only sometimes. I'm not reckless.
A low, reverberating grunt rolls through the air as two gargoyle soldiers — enormous, dark-skinned, with wings folded tight against their backs — haul a pine timber the size of a small bridge into position against the northern defence wall.
The human carpenters flanking them don't flinch anymore. That itself feels like a small miracle.
The skirmishes start midmorning.
Tharros's scouts hit the eastern perimeter first. No warning — just a guttural screech from the ridge and then the hiss of crossbow bolts punching through canvas. I don't think. I move.
"Wall crews, fall back to the secondary line! Archers up!"
Velka is already sprinting past me in the opposite direction, axe drawn, copper skin catching the pale light. She grins at me as she passes. "Finally," she says, like she's been waiting for an excuse.
What follows is brutal and short and, in its strange way, clarifying.
A gargoyle soldier takes a bolt to the wing joint — I hear the crack of it — and staggers sideways into the timber scaffolding.
Before the human crew beside him can scatter, Daven, a young archer from the valley who barely shaves, steps into the gap and covers the gargoyle's exposed flank with three quick shots that send the enemy scouts scrambling.
The gargoyle looks down at him. Daven looks up.
Neither of them says a word. The gargoyle rights himself, rolls his injured wing once, and continues fighting.
That is how it happens. Not with a speech. Not with a treaty. With Daven and a borrowed quiver of arrows and a gargoyle who didn't let him die.
Later, when a section of rock face gives way above the digger crews, it is a gargoyle wing that sweeps the largest boulder clear.
A human woman shouts her thanks in a voice still shaking with adrenaline.
The gargoyle dips its scarred head. A fragile understanding cracks open in the air between the two groups — tentative, necessary, and new.
By the time the skirmish is contained and the perimeter is reset, I am standing at the eastern wall running a headcount of my section when I realize Vorgrym is standing three feet to my right.
I don't startle anymore at a gargoyle appearing silently from nowhere. This is what my life is now.
He says nothing for a moment. Just looks out over the digger crews with that single ruined eye, slate-dark and unreadable. Then he turns his massive, scarred head toward me and dips it — slowly, deliberately.
"Your eastern line held," he says.
"It held because your people covered the break."
"They covered it because they were told to trust the line you set."
I don't know what to do with that coming from Vorgrym, so I just nod back and return to my map before either of us makes it awkward.
By nightfall, the main command tent is warm and dim with oil lamp glow, smelling of tallow and damp wool and the faint mineral scent that clings to gargoyles like quarry dust. The tactical maps are spread across the long center table — terrain sketches, trap placements, patrol rotations, supply inventory.
Velka is arguing with one of the Ashwing generals about something involving the western pass that I stopped following twenty minutes ago.
Father Corren's notes are pinned in the corner.
Leif is present but quiet, seated at the far end of the table with his arms crossed, watching everything with wide eyes he's trying hard to make look calm.
I am halfway through recalculating the eastern deadfall spacing when I feel him.
I look up.
Tovian is standing at the opposite end of the table, arms folded across the vast expanse of his chest, a tactical map completely ignored in front of him.
He is looking at me. Not at the maps. Not at Velka's increasingly emphatic argument.
At me. With that dark, unhurried attention that used to make my pulse spike with fear and now does something entirely different and significantly more inconvenient.
I hold his gaze for exactly one beat.
Then I point my charcoal pencil at him across the table. "You're going to leave a scorch mark on the canvas if you keep staring at me like that."
Velka stops mid-sentence. The Ashwing general blinks his enormous yellow eyes. Leif makes a sound that might be a laugh he immediately swallows.
Tovian doesn’t look away. The corner of his mouth moves. Just barely.
"Continue," he says.
"I'm serious. Someone's going to think something is on fire."
"Something is not on fire."
"Your dignity might be."
He uncrosses his arms slowly, tilts his head, and the quality of his silence says I am choosing not to respond to that in a way that is somehow worse than if he had.
The meeting disperses in pieces — Velka dragging the Ashwing general back into the logistics argument as they duck out of the tent, Leif murmuring a quiet goodnight, Vorgrym leaving without ceremony as he arrived.
The oil lamps gutter in the draft of the open tent flap and then the canvas settles again and it is just the two of us and the mountain wind pressing cold fingers against the tent.
Tovian moves around the table. Not fast. He has stopped moving fast around me when we are alone, which I think is more deliberate a restraint than I used to give him credit for.
He stops close enough that I have to look up.
"I meant what I said," I tell him. "You were staring."
"I was."
"It's unsettling."
"You were unsettled?"
I think about lying. It would be the smarter choice. "No," I admit.
The rigid line of his jaw softens — barely, but I know his face now the way you learn a difficult landscape by walking it in all weathers. He reaches out and adjusts the corner of the nearest map.
"After centuries of warriors who only know how to bow," he says, his voice dropping into that low register that does terrible things to my composure, "there is something in your tongue that reminds me I am still alive."
The wind presses against the canvas. The fire in the pit outside snaps once, bright and brief.
"Careful," I say quietly, a small smile playing on my lips. "That almost sounded like a compliment."
"Almost," he agrees.