Chapter Forty
WILDER
T he Tverrian battle horns blasted across the golden valleys, and in the fading light, the frontlines of the enemy forces crested a ridge, marching straight for Notos.
Steeling himself, Wilder kissed Thea hard before strapping his swords to his back. ‘I’ll see you at the wall,’ he said.
He met Torj and Vernich on the southern rampart and surveyed the incoming attack. It was still light enough to see that their enemy had come prepared. They carried ladders for the walls and several battering rams.
‘No catapults,’ Torj observed.
‘They won’t need them, not if the wraiths attack from the skies,’ Wilder said. ‘We need to rethink our plan…’
The others looked at him warily.
‘Hawthorne… Bit late for that, isn’t it?’ Vernich muttered, shaking his head.
‘No.’ Wilder scraped the loose hair back from his face and tucked it into the knot at the back of his head. ‘We should divide and conquer.’
‘We agreed we’d work as a unit,’ Torj argued.
‘Neither the wraiths nor the reapers will attack as a single unit. We need to be able to meet them from as many angles as we can.’ He looked to Torj.
‘Similar tactic to when we were attacked in the woods. Gather a small unit of the best Guardians, and our apprentices. They can bring the wraiths down and we’ll slay them.
The regular forces from Harenth, Tver and Aveum can handle the ordinary soldiers. ’
The sound of war drums began to echo across the valley and the dark mass of soldiers crept closer.
‘Fuck it,’ Torj said. ‘Let’s do it your way, Hawthorne.’
Vernich at last grunted his agreement and the three Warswords split up. Torj was to lead the main archers and defend them from the initial skybound attacks; Vernich was to take the northern wall and Wilder to command from the south.
As he walked the perimeter, checking on the commanders and their units, Wilder could feel King Artos’ magic sweeping through their forces, boosting the morale of their own soldiers.
It was both a clever and dangerous tactic, but one he didn’t question at this late stage.
He only hoped it didn’t result in warriors trying to be stupidly heroic in the face of their newfound fearlessness. Sometimes, fear was an asset.
A glance at the land before them told him there wasn’t much time until impact. While the fortified castle was protected to the west by forest and mountains, it was all that stood between the enemy and the villages that lay beyond.
Screams for mercy sounded at the gate – townsfolk threw themselves at the reinforced timber, begging to be let in. But the deadline had passed. The sun was down and now they had to take their chances with the monsters.
It was a part of war that Wilder had never grown accustomed to: that in the mess of it all, it was always the innocents who suffered most, those who’d never asked for the fight.
There was nothing he could do for them now, so he checked that the gates had been reinforced. A wave of conflicted emotion washed over him again as he saw Malik there, helping another man place a final thick timber plank across the breadth of the secondary gates.
Malik shouldn’t be here. He had given enough, had suffered enough, and what awaited them beyond the thick stone walls was more than Wilder wanted his brother to bear.
Glory in death, immortality in legend had been Malik’s motto once.
Wilder couldn’t linger. His brother had made his choice, and now Wilder had to make his.
He ran to the heart of the southern wall, where his own unit of Guardians waited. A third of them manned several catapults along the length of the wall, while the rest made up two rows of archers at the ready.
Thea waited, her own bow and arrow in hand.
His heartbeat faltered.
She had lined her eyes with kohl, as the women warriors of distant realms did for battle. Her beautiful face was a veil of calm, hiding the storm beneath.
But he couldn’t think of her now.
Instead, he accepted a longbow from a nearby Guardian and looked out onto what would become their battlefield.
The sun had dipped below the horizon, bathing the land in a midnight-blue hue. Across the expanse of enemy forces, torches dotted their ranks.
Wilder scanned their own legion, poised for attack. Along the wall their own torches blazed, as well as fire pits to light their arrows, oil barrels and projectiles.
The noise of their adversaries’ march drew nearer, the rhythm of heavy footfalls and the clink of armour sounding more and more like war drums, the promise of violence and death and suffering.
Wilder gathered himself and looked to the enemy.
There was always a moment like this: the intake of breath before the battle, the calm before the storm. The stilling of time where the two sides waited to see who dared to draw first blood.
Wilder’s forces looked to him expectantly. Now was the time for heroic words and rallying cries. He fucking hated war speeches. But they were not for him, but for the men, to steel them against the terror that threatened to loosen their bladders and see them flee.
‘Warriors of Thezmarr, soldiers of Tver, Aveum and Harenth, hear me. We have prepared for this, all day here in Notos, and before that – for all our lives. We have done the work. We have endured the training, fought the faces of darkness… Now, here we stand, and that all falls away. Now, it is far more simple. Us, or them.’
He paused, letting his words sink in, knowing they had just as much power as any sword.
‘So I ask you: what is the measure of a Guardian? A warrior of the midrealms? I say it is to taste death and stand tall in the face of it. To defend those who cannot defend themselves. The measure of a true warrior is that they fight when others will not. And that they fight until the end.’
Wilder drew a sharp breath, lifting his bow, noting the heavy silence that had settled across his forces. ‘Death finds us all in the end,’ he called. ‘And whether it’s today, tomorrow, or fifty years from now, ask yourself: what will your death mean?’
‘The Hand of Death guides us,’ someone shouted, a bow lifting at the back of the unit. ‘Until the end!’
More bows lifted in solidarity. ‘Until the end!’ came the echo.
Wilder heard Thea’s voice chime through the rest. ‘Until the end!’
And with that, he nocked an arrow to his bow, turning back to the waiting enemy. ‘Archers!’ he shouted. ‘Nock!’
He heard the flurry of movement all around as fletching brushed quivers, as arrows tapped against timber and were fitted to strings.
‘Draw!’ he ordered, pulling his own string back and taking aim.
Again he heard his command being heeded.
‘Loose!’ he cried.
A hundred arrows rained down on the frontline of the enemy. Many fell to the ground before they’d even had the chance to raise their shields.
‘Again!’ Wilder called. ‘Nock —’
An ear-splitting shriek sounded from above and Wilder whirled around, his arrow still drawn. He shot it into the first wraith he saw flapping overhead. It lurched in the sky, his arrow protruding from its leg.
‘Archers! To the wraiths!’ Wilder shouted, already unloading a second and third arrow into his target, surging for it as it fell, unsheathing his sword, ready to claim its heart.
Thea was already there, slicing through its chest and tearing the black organ from the cavity.
Another wraith fell from above, then another, brought down by the Guardian archers, Wilder and Thea making quick work of carving through flesh and bone. The men cheered as they did, but Wilder knew it was only the beginning —
‘Ladders!’ sounded Torj’s voice from nearby. ‘Stop the ladders!’
The walls were madness as Wilder’s unit scrambled to push the ladders from the castle. Men who had once seemed squeamish at the idea of boiling water and oil were readily throwing buckets over the side, their bodies sagging with relief when they heard the screams of agony from the other side.
‘Archers! Hold the line!’ Torj called, while Wilder cut an enemy soldier in two, the torso toppling back over the parapet.
Scanning the wall, he saw that several more ladders had found purchase, and that a number of attackers had breached their defences already.
Too soon , Wilder thought. It was too soon for breaches to be happening. He signalled to Torj to man his archers as well, before spearing another wraith from the sky and ending it.
There was no sign of King Leiko’s missing army unit, nor was there any sign of the rheguld reapers . The realisation made Wilder’s stomach churn. They were holding back… but why?
‘Ready the catapults!’ he commanded, glimpsing Thea bringing down another winged monster, her light armour already smeared with black and red blood. It looked good on her.
The Guardians of Thezmarr rallied to his call, the catapults groaning as they were loaded with stones and balls of oil-soaked twine.
‘Fire!’ Wilder yelled.
Projectiles soared over the ramparts and barrelled towards the enemy. Their lines broke upon impact, bodies and earth flying.
‘Again!’ Wilder shoved a struggling trio of men aside to load a weapon himself, his Furies-given strength assisting him. ‘Fire!’ He loosed the mechanism and the catapult sent a boulder straight into the frontlines again. But the enemy were quick to reclaim their formations.
Wilder assessed their own units. The Guardians of Thezmarr stood strong, deploying efficient attacks in unified waves. The soldiers from the royal forces, however, were chaotic in their fear. King Artos’ empath magic had worn off and now they wore glazed expressions of shock.
‘The ladders!’ Wilder surged for one that had hit the wall, enemies spilling over the top, brandishing their swords.