Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 721: Artillery Exercise

Ferlin Eltek had not expected to be surprised by a parade.

He knew what military formations looked like. As the Morning Light — the Western Region’s acknowledged star knight — he had spent more than a decade among men who trained for exactly this: the clean horizontal line, the synchronized step, the impression of a single disciplined body rather than a collection of individuals. Nobles drilled their retinues for precisely this effect and rarely achieved it with more than a few rows. The discipline required to keep order in a large formation degraded exponentially with numbers. Ten knights in a line was achievable; fifty was difficult; a hundred was the kind of thing that happened at coronations under heavy rehearsal and still went subtly wrong.

What was climbing the wall in front of him was more than a hundred. Over ten in each column and row, all in matching uniforms with bright diagonal ribbons, every step hitting the same beat. The formation moved as one thing, its mass and momentum building with distance the way a river builds as it descends.

The crowd around Ferlin was saying what the crowd always said at things like this — pointing out family members, marveling at the order — but he was watching something different. He was watching the ratio of size to cohesion and what that implied about the people who had produced it.

“It’s a shame May couldn’t see this,” Irene said beside him. She had her arm through his, her eyes bright, a flush at her cheeks from the cold. “She would have known exactly how to put it in a drama.”

“She’s pregnant. A frozen wall isn’t the place for her right now.” He smiled. “There’ll be more of these. He’s not going to stop building, and he’ll keep showing people what he’s built.”

This was what Ferlin had come to understand about the king he had surrendered to: the demonstrations weren’t about ego. They were calculations. Every artillery exercise, every public spectacle, every Parade March that Echo sent into the air over the crowd was a contribution to something the king was building more patiently and more deliberately than anyone Ferlin had encountered in the noble class.

He had once thought that losing to Roland Wimbledon was the end of a career.

“Would you want to join?” Irene asked suddenly.

He blinked. “The army?”

“I can feel it.” She squeezed his arm slightly. “Your heart rate changed when they came up the wall.”

He exhaled, and his breath was white in the cold air. His father had been right about him, years ago, in a single sentence he hadn’t wanted to hear: if you really loved books, you’d have become a scholar. But he had become a knight instead, had spent years building a reputation and a name, and had not stopped to consider why he’d chosen that particular form of ambition.

The answer, now, was obvious.

He watched the artillerymen take their positions.

He wondered what the adviser corps looked like. How developed it was. His father had mentioned that it was another way in — not combat command, for a knight who had surrendered, but something adjacent to it. Something that used what he knew rather than wasting it.

One day.

The music stopped.

The silence that replaced it had a different quality from ordinary silence — the particular tension of two thousand people who have been told something is about to happen and are very ready.

Van’er gave the order and six Longsong Cannons swung their barrels toward the first row of cages, three hundred meters out. The fuze shells would hit the snow beneath the cages rather than the animals directly — the demonic beasts’ bodies were unreliable trigger surfaces, and they needed the detonation to occur regardless.

“Look at that ugly thing.” Nelson was watching the wolf-bear hybrid slam itself against its bars. The cage shook with each impact, the frame visibly bending.

“Focus,” Van’er said. He wasn’t unkind about it. He was the kind of man who managed his team by being harder on himself than on them, and they knew it.

“I’m nervous,” Cat’s Claw admitted. His voice had gone stiff. “All those eyes.”

“Worse than the duke’s knights,” someone else said. “At least the knights were trying to kill us. These people just want to see if we’ll embarrass ourselves.”

“Load,” Van’er said. “Everything else stops.”

The loading procedure was mechanical in the best sense — the hands knew what to do and the mind could go quiet while the hands worked it. Van’er had long since reached the point where his consciousness could be elsewhere during loading, which was both useful and, in this moment, something of a trap. His mind went back.

His brother, cold and thin and then gone. A city wall made of rubble and fast-setting cement. The moment when a man he barely knew had said I have faith in you and meant it, and Van’er had known he meant it because nothing about the man suggested he said things he didn’t mean.

He had stayed. Not out of obligation — out of something that didn’t have a simpler name.

He looked toward the distant figure on the wall, gray-haired, still, watching. He’d learned not to look for reassurance in other people’s expressions. He didn’t need it from Roland Wimbledon. He knew what he’d find there: the same thing that had always been there. The kind of steadiness that didn’t require demonstration.

Iron Axe’s countdown came from above.

The crowd had gone so quiet that Van’er could hear the demonic beast struggling in its cage.

“—Two. One. Fire.”

Six barrels discharged simultaneously. The sound hit the wall and bounced back, the snow on every flat surface erupting into white mist. By the time the crowd heard the report the shells had already crossed three hundred meters and detonated — six simultaneous concussions, each one blowing a column of earth and snow and cage fragments straight upward.

What remained of the animals was not recognizable as what they had been.

The crowd didn’t wait to process it. The cheering came up immediately, loud and sustained, wave after wave, the sound of people who had been afraid of something for a long time and were watching that thing come apart.

Van’er began the reload sequence.

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