Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 573: The Battle of Fallen Dragon Ridge

The 152 shipboard artillery fired, and the steel hull shuddered beneath Iron Axe’s boots.

Seconds later, a column of smoke and dust bloomed against the city wall. When it dispersed, he pressed the telescope to his eye and found what he was looking for: a fresh crack in the lower stone, wide enough to count as progress.

Fallen Dragon Ridge was not King’s City. Located in the central south, it had not been built for war — its wall stood barely half the height of Longsong Stronghold’s, the rampart walk so narrow that two men couldn’t pass abreast, with no room for mangonels or any siege equipment worth mentioning. This had made the artillery’s task almost insulting. He had already broken through the gate and the north wall. One more opening and the Vanguard Battalion could enter the city in three streams simultaneously.

If only the witches had come. The thought arrived and departed. Three charges of explosives, in Nightingale’s hands, would have brought this entire wall down in less than a minute. Three shells cost more than a wall like this deserved.

He recognized the shift in his own thinking. Six months ago, he had insisted the army should accomplish every task on its own. After King’s City — after watching witches move through a battlefield the way water moves through a sieve — he understood that perfect warfare was integrated warfare. The witch as forward eye. The witch as surgical strike. He was still learning to stop fighting that understanding.

“Sir!” the man in the observation post called down. “The gate — they’re massing horses behind it!”

Iron Axe trained his telescope on the ruined gate. The dust rising behind the wall told the story before the shapes resolved: cavalry gathering for a charge.

“Do we redirect the naval guns?” Van’er asked.

“No. Two or three shells to scatter horses — a waste.” He lowered the glass. “They’re planning to break our artillery line with a mounted charge. It won’t work. The guns they’re riding at can fire faster than they can close the distance.” He turned to the woman standing a few paces back. “Countess Spear — once this charge is broken, there won’t be many knights left in the domain.”

Spear’s face was stone. “They chose my brother’s side. They stopped being my knights when they made that choice.” A pause. “This is the price of betrayal.”

“Understood.” He let a breath settle. “And Redwyne Passi — have you decided?”

The letter from the City Hall had arrived yesterday evening, its instructions precise: all nobles excluding Spear’s own family were to be escorted to Neverwinter. Resistance meant execution. Their properties would be seized by City Hall officers, their households absorbed into the mine labor pools. Only Redwyne himself had been designated differently — the countess’s choice to make.

Spear had not yet made it.

Iron Axe understood why. He did not share the hesitation. Betrayal was the one category of wrongdoing for which no calculus of mercy applied.

“They’re coming!” the observer shouted.

He swung the glass back to the gate. The knights poured out — bright armor, lances leveled, the sound of hoofbeats reaching him a half-second after he saw them move. Less than a hundred meters out, the rifles opened. Smoke streaked the field in ragged white lines. More than twenty knights and their squires went down, horses tumbling, men not rising. The field artillery didn’t even need grapeshot. The revolving rifles and the two heavy machine guns held the line without effort, a door shutting in front of the charge before it could become one.

Then the naval artillery found the last section of wall, and the stone gave way.

Iron Axe raised his hand and blew the whistle. Three columns of Vanguard soldiers poured forward through the three gaps.

Fallen Dragon Ridge was no longer a siege.

Two hours later, the First Army held the castle and the church.

The last defenders had broken when the gate knights fell. Nobody rallied, nobody organized a final stand. The church had already emptied its valuables and Priest Rosad was gone — no secret tunnel this time, no hidden passage. The mountains at the city’s back offered no escape route. Soldiers found Redwyne Passi at the castle’s highest floor, cornered and shaking.

Iron Axe cleared the room of everyone except the countess and her bound brother, and waited outside.

The silence lasted long enough to make the guards uncomfortable.

When Spear’s voice reached him, it was quiet — not defeated, but exhausted in the way of someone who has held a thing too long and finally put it down.

“I don’t understand what you hoped to gain. You know nothing of administration or trade. Even if you sat in this chair, you’d hand the real power to the other feudatories. Did you believe I meant so little to you that strangers mattered more?”

“You’re a witch.” Redwyne’s voice cracked with something older than anger. “A demon’s servant. Father was wrong about you. You deceived him.”

“I’m still your sister.”

“You aren’t. You never were.” He seemed to spit each word separately, working up to something. “You’re a bastard he adopted. I heard him say it himself when he was drunk. You’re the mistake he made in his youth — you’re not even a Passi.”

A long pause.

“If that’s true,” Spear said slowly, “then you’re not my brother either.”

“I’m the real heir. The true Earl of Fallen Dragon Ridge. Release me. I demand to be treated as a nobleman.”

Footsteps. The door opened, and Spear emerged — not weeping, but moving carefully, as if the floor might not support full weight.

Iron Axe caught her arm. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She breathed in. “Send — send Redwyne Passi to Neverwinter. The mines. He’s lost his mind.” A beat. “He’s not my brother. I don’t know what he is, but he’s not that.”

“As you wish,” Iron Axe said.

He went to arrange it.

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