Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 117: Chase (Part 1)

Carter had never seen a battle before.

He had seen brawls, executions, demonic beasts cut open at the wall. He had trained men to use swords for years and broken up more fights than he could count. None of it had prepared him for what lay between the defensive line and the treeline: twenty bodies arranged in a line as neat as fence posts, the pattern of the canister shot’s work visible in the way they had fallen, together, at the same distance from the muzzle.

Knights. Longsong Stronghold’s finest. The same category of fighter he had trained himself to be, years ago.

He had his team pick up the severed limbs and place them back with the bodies while others searched the field for the living. It was the correct thing to do. He did it without feeling it, because what he was feeling was harder to name.

The First Army members who had seen the field were going pale in ones and twos, some vomiting at the treeline. Carter didn’t blame them for it. Killing at distance was a different weight than killing up close — less personal, somehow, and therefore stranger in the body’s response to it. You didn’t know you had done it until it was already done.

He stood in the fading light and looked at the field and at the mountains going dark beyond it and thought about what came next.

This changes everything.

Not Border Town specifically. Everything. A line of two hundred and seventy men with strange short rifles and four iron tubes had stopped a cavalry charge of three hundred knights without allowing them inside fifty meters. The knights were not cowards. They had not failed. They had ridden directly into something that had no answer in their doctrine, no counter in their training, and they had died because the gap between their world and this one had, apparently, been closing for some time without anyone on their side noticing.

Carter looked at the line of bodies and understood a thing he had suspected for months but could not have said aloud until now.

The era of the knights was over. It had ended this afternoon, on a road outside Border Town, without anyone who mattered being there to watch it end.

He turned and went back to his unit.

Duke Ryan had not yet recovered when his personal guards set up the command tent by the river.

His knights had lit torches to draw in the separated men, and the count was bad: most of his force was still missing, scattered across ten miles of road. The freedmen had taken the food carts and vanished. The horses they slaughtered for supper were silent about what they thought of the arrangement.

The five noble families crowded into the largest tent and looked at him.

“Someone tell me what we were hit with,” Ryan said.

No one answered immediately. He looked at Rene Elk, who had been at the front.

“I couldn’t see anything clearly,” Rene said. He had the particular stillness of a man working very hard to keep his voice useful. “Every time the roar came, our men went down in groups. And the last time—” He paused. “It was like riding into a wall that wasn’t there. Heads. Arms. Just—” He searched for words. “Like an egg dropped from the top of a city wall.”

“Witchcraft,” Count Elk muttered.

“No.” Ryan’s voice came out harder than he intended. “My knights wore the Stone of Retaliation. Witch power can’t touch them. This wasn’t witchcraft.”

“My lord.” Rene spoke again, carefully. “Before the first sound — I saw the carts. In a row. Each one had a large iron pipe, and there was a red light from it, and smoke.”

“An iron pipe.” Count Elk frowned. “Like a ceremony barrel?”

Ryan knew what a ceremony barrel was. He had two bronze ones in his own castle, used for festivals, packed with snow powder that made a sharp crack and a flash. He had lit them himself. The sound bore the same relationship to what he had heard this afternoon as a candle bore to a forge fire.

“A ceremony barrel cannot kill a knight,” Count Honeysuckle said flatly. “Whatever the Prince used, it killed knights. So. What do we do?”

Ryan looked at him. The word defeat had been in Honeysuckle’s voice without being in his mouth, and Ryan found it more irritating that way.

“We haven’t lost,” he said. “A battle is not a war. We reach the Stronghold. Behind thirty feet of limestone and a full moat, those iron pipes become problems I can answer with trebuchets. And then I cut the Shishui River trade. Without food coming in from the river, Border Town lasts a month. Less.” He let them sit with that. “When Roland has to move his army to survive, he has to come into the open. In the open, my knights can operate. And they will.”

He dismissed them to their tents.

The next day passed without any sign of pursuit.

Ryan sent riders in expanding circles. They all came back with the same report: no movement, no column, no sign the First Army had left its defensive positions. He felt the tension in his chest ease slightly. The weapon is too heavy to move. He had suspected it — trebuchets had the same problem, useful behind walls, useless in the field. The fourth prince’s miners with their sticks and iron pipes couldn’t chase a cavalry force on the road. He had nothing to fear from pursuit.

Still. He had the feeling, all day, of being watched from some distance he couldn’t identify.

He attributed it to nerves. He told himself that twice, and almost believed it both times.

By late afternoon, sixty-six knights had reformed around his position, the mercenaries and freedmen trickling in behind. They raised a camp as the light failed. He would sleep. Tomorrow he would reach the Stronghold. And then the work of rebuilding would begin.

He was still telling himself this when the gunfire woke him in the morning.

Not distant gunfire. Close. Too close, from too many directions to be a problem he could organize a response to before he was outside the tent and moving.

The camp was dissolving. Men were running with no direction, hands over their heads. To the west — one line of the strange uniform, two neat rows, weapons raised. The same men. The same posture. As if they hadn’t moved at all, which was impossible, because they were three miles from where they’d been yesterday.

“My lord — horse — now!”

He was already moving, his guard pressing a rein into his hand, and they rode east, away from the line, out of the camp and onto the road.

The second line was waiting for them there.

Same uniform. Same two rows. Same weapons, and the same patience in the men holding them — the patience of people who had arrived at a position they intended to keep, and had been there long enough to be comfortable.

And then the song started.

The rhythm he had heard once, yesterday, as his army fled. The same cheerful, insistent meter, and the boots picking it up beneath it, and the line beginning to move.

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